Leadership is the ability to inspire and motivate YOURSELF and OTHERS into taking positive, lasting action!

Motivating You

These days, more and more of us are freelancing, or running solo businesses.

The life of a solo practitioner can be a lonely one. Alone in your office or home, without the stimulation of colleagues and the energy of a busy office or institution, it can be a challenge to maintain your positive energy and stay motivated.

In other words, the life of a “solopreneur” can be a lonely one.

For those who chose that route because of all the benefits it offers – being your own boss, choosing your own clients, setting your own schedule – there are a number of ways to stay sharp and positive.

Attitude is everything! Believe in yourself and the work that you are doing and don’t let negative people get you down.

Surround yourself with positive people – clients, friends, family, partners. Working with clients who are passionate and excited about what they do and who have reasonable expectations of what you can do for them will keep you motivated and interested. Friends and family help to keep you grounded, and their faith in you is invaluable. A good executive coach (hey, is that a plug?!!!) can also help you to remain motivated and to focus on your goals, both professional and personal.

Speaking of goals, focusing on short-term, realistic goals will also help to keep you motivated. Think about your client load, their expectations, and how much work you can reasonably handle without driving yourself crazy.

Be realistic about your strengths as a sole practitioner and reach out to others to help you with everything else. Better to  play to your strengths, and hire talent to fill the gaps, rather than struggle to be good at everything.

As you work with clients to help them achieve their goals, keep your own goals in mind. Visualize what you want to accomplish and remain faithful to that. Focus on the larger goals.

Keeping a positive attitude can be difficult when things don’t go exactly as planned. Take time to work through the negative feelings, realizing that they are temporary, and work at getting back to a positive place.

When things don’t work out as planned, turn disappointments into opportunities for growth. Learn from failure and use it to build success.

And finally, be good to yourself. Take time for friends and family. Step away from the computer. Put down the Blackberry. Eat well, get enough sleep, and indulge your passions. Nourish yourself.

February 19th, 2010
It’s one of the toughest times ever — both for those out of work and perhaps, even more, for those who have held on to their jobs. The plain fact is that employees need to cover more work with less available resources in order for their companies to survive, let alone thrive. Employers, on the other hand, require employees who understand just how much is at stake and who are just as invested as the top executives are in making things work.

Employers have been able to hold onto top talent because of the poor economy, but that may no longer be enough to retain those high performers, especially when the economic climate improves. The number of Americans who reported being happy with their careers dropped to an all-time low — 45 percent — in a new Conference Board survey that found people are more miserable than ever in nearly every aspect of their work lives.

What can you, as an employer, do to increase motivation and engagement and help those employees you value through challenging times? How can you, as a leader, set the tone and motivate and inspire your team, leading to a happier and more productive workplace? (Remember, when things get better, you don’t want to lose your best workers – retraining and rehiring is an expensive proposition!)

Employees are looking for true leaders…who can talk AND walk like true coaches! “Nothing is better than a leader who understands the value of the coaching process, who learns from his or her own coach, and then takes those skills into the workplace to develop and lead a team,” comments Ed Abel, President of Abel Institute, an international leader in business coaching, whose company develops business owners into powerful business leaders.

Here are just a few great skills that all leaders can develop, courtesy of iPEC Coaching:
• Share the vision and empower employees to contribute their ideas and give feedback. Ask more questions than you answer, and seek to get “buy in” to the plan. Ask questions like, “what does the plan need in order to make it work for you?”
• Don’t make promises you can’t keep – employees appreciate honesty! Level with your team and show that you are committed to helping them.
• Listen to your employees’ concerns, and acknowledge and validate their fears. Focus not only on “what” they say, but on the context of the message (where are they truly coming from? why are saying what they are saying? what does their tone tell you? other non-verbal cues?).
• Celebrate successes and give recognition. Adam Gostick and Chester Elton, in “The Carrot Principle: How Great Managers Use Employee Recognition,” write “For organizations that do it right, it’s a bit like discovering gold in your backyard. Employee recognition, long considered a benefit that costs money, can actually be a management tool that makes money.”
• Find out what internal drivers motivate your employees (it’s not a one size fits all approach) — is it more exposure, creative outlets, time off, etc? What else will speak to their individual needs? Then create opportunities that play to these drivers.
• Lead by example, and with integrity: D. Luke Iorio, President of iPEC Coaching comments, “It’s often been said that true leaders emerge when times are tough – it’s what you do in the difficult times that makes you a leader; and this is when your integrity will be tested the most… When your actions match your message and your decisions match your principles, others view you as genuine, authentic and trustworthy. They will follow your lead.”

“When are you going to start living your dreams?,” asks Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney) in the new movie, “Up in The Air.” Bingham, who is a corporate axe-man, asks the question of a guy he has just fired. The fired executive smiles, knowingly, as he realizes that the time has come — and that, at last, he may have a shot at living the life he had only imagined.

It was the right question, at the right time, asked in the right way.

The right question can make your head hurt. Why is that?

When we ask ourselves questions, we ask the same kind of questions — resulting in the same kind of answers. And , so, we are stuck, and then usually stay stuck — stuck in our old patterns, and our old way of doing things. Stuck in mediocrity. Stuck in the cycle of stuckness. Unless we ask ourselves new kinds of questions, we can’t seem to break the pattern of our responses — and the quicksand thickens.

My coach asks me questions that can leave me dumbstruck, sometimes generating an audible groan or whimper, like that of my dog, Bueller, when he knows he has misbehaved. It is an “oh, I wish you hadn’t asked that” groan, because it is exactly where I need to “go” — it is the unexamined which needs examining. It is the line of questioning destined to uncover my gremlins and fears, my assumptions and limiting beliefs — those thoughts that hold me back.

Albert Einstein said: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” What this means is that a shift needs to happen. We need to see things from a different perspective.

A coach helps clients see things from a different view to create a necessary shift in order to find the answer or solution. It is a little like rewiring the brain..and our brains often need rewiring. Asking these kinds of questions can also create an energy shift, moving an individual into a higher level of conscious energy and positive possibilities.

So what are the elements of a good question? (now, that is a good question!)

These are questions designed to elicit the other person’s point of view. Open-ended (Who, what, when, where, why and how) questions that genuinely invite open sharing and begin with phrases such as:

How does that affect…?
What did you notice about…?
What were our expectations when…?

Stay away from questions that can be answered “yes” or “no.”

A few examples of a good question:

When are you at your best?
What would you be able to do if you had no fear?
How do you express your gifts?
What is your purpose?
What are your core values?
What would be the best thing that could happen by “saying no?”

Or the question that motivated me to pursue my ambition of starting my own business, “what would your life look like if you stopped playing small?”

So, consider surrounding yourself with people who ask you those open-ended questions, those empowering, powerful questions that get your mind really working. Maybe it is a coach, maybe it is a good friend or another supporter, someone who will suspend judgement and compel you to think in a new way – a way that will create new energy to take different and more positive action.

And try to be that person who asks these kinds of powerful questions – what a gift you can give to others in your life. The gift of curiousity and caring…and empowerment.

And how do we, as listeners, learn to listen between the lines when receiving the answer…well, that will be the subject for some future article.

Top 10 Leadership Lessons I Learned from My Wheaten Terrier, Bueller

Leadership is the ability to motivate and inspire others to take positive and sustainable action. We are all leaders – it is not whether we lead, it is how well we lead. While human beings may be the alpha in most families, that is not to say that we can’t learn much from our canine friends. So here are the top 10 leadership lessons I learned from my sweet and adorable, albeit highstrung 3 year old Wheaten Terrier, Bueller (yes, as in “Ferris”).

10. Run with the Alpha Dogs

Whenever I take Bueller out for a stroll or to the dog park, he’s immediately attracted to lively, energetic dogs, as if feeding off their energy and level of excitement. But are humans really that different? Energy and enthusiasm are contagious, so surround yourself with as many optimists, go-getters and energetic types as you can (just be sure to skip the “dog greeting” part)

9. Be willing to learn new skills

Last month, at the ripe old age of 3, Bueller learned to fetch for the first time. Turns out, you can teach an older dog (he’d be highly insulted if I referred to him as “old”) new tricks. Those times they are a changin’, so acquire the skill sets you need to change with them, or risk getting left behind when the pack moves on. 

8. Get enough sleep

A no-brainer. You can’t even function properly, let alone be your sharpest or at your absolute best, on less sleep than your body needs to renew/regenerate itself. Of course, perhaps the 17 hours a day Bueller puts in is overdoing it a tad…

7. Be a dog with a bone

Bueller’s tenacious. When he gets his hands, er, teeth, on something, he never lets go, no matter what I try to do to yank it free or distract him. Perseverance, determination and tenacity are the qualities of many an effective leader.

6. Be loyal

Sure, loyalty comes naturally to pets, but humans do seem to struggle mightily with the concept at times. Showing loyalty and acting with integrity not only reveals character and lets people know if you can be trusted, it inspires others to treat you in kind. In this case, you get what you give, so why not give your absolute best?

5. Be curious

Bueller accepts nothing at face value. He sniffs and sniffs until he finds out all that he wants to know. He is curious about who is at the door, where the smell of food is coming from and what you have in your pocket. Great leaders are equally curious, and while they might not eat your couch to get to the bottom of things, they definitely “listen between the lines” until they get the answer they seek.

4. Live in the Moment

Every moment is a new opportunity for my pup. What happened a minute ago, or what might happen in the future, is of far less interest to him than what is happening at this very second. The freedom that he finds in living this way releases him from worry. Great leaders, while they have a compelling vision, believe that to truly experience life is to be in the moment.

3. Know when to stop chasing your tail

Tail chasing can be really fun for a dog, and for some people, too. But even a dog knows when enough is enough, when it’s time to eat, or chase a new dog, or give you a hug or a lick. A true leader realizes when it is time to let an idea go and to create something new, and when enough energy and resources have been devoted to a project which , perhaps, is ahead of its time.

2. Use your instincts

Bueller is a holographic thinker – he brings in all of his senses as he lives his life. He smells it, tastes it, feels it, sees it, hears it.  Great Leaders use all of their senses, their instincts, their emotions, intuiton and analytical skills to arrive at the best possible solution.

Bueller and Alan

Dogs love to bark and to bark loud.  They say “here I am, and I listen to what I have to say.”  A true leader makes sure that his voice is heard, even when expressing an unpopular opinion. He risks what people think about him, and speaks his mind.

So how are you going to lead? Time to learn from our four-legged friends!

Anybody out there stuck on what to blog about? or when to blog? or whether to blog at all? At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, but “what is all the fuss about blogging.” Seems like everyone is spending so much time thinking and talking about blogging that there isn’t going to be anyone left to read the darn blogs.
Where I get stuck is trying to figure out what I have to say that no one else has said, in a way that no one else has said it. A coach friend of mine suggested carrying around a tape recorder, recording my thoughts and writing down ideas as they come – but while I am writing down the things that come to me, am I remembering to live and experience my life. And how much time do I have to devote to blogging anyway? I am in the process of finding my voice, but can I find it without blogging? I want to be authentic, and to express myself in my writing, but what do I have to say that hasn’t been said before?…How is my voice unique? Who is out there to read what I have to say? Am I doing this just to keep up with everyone else? Okay, I am going to give it a try, at least for a while, and see what comes of it…but I have to say, I am not sold yet…
Does it need to be said, does it need to be said by me, does it need to be said now? These are the questions….

I love networking. I’m all about it.  I want to meet people with good energy, and explore ways in which we can help each other, and maybe even work together.   I’m finding that now, more than ever, I don’t want to go it alone.  I realize, though, that networking is not everyone’s bag. For some, it is right up there with public speaking and root canal.   I am not saying that it always comes easily – sometimes, for me, first it means visualizing how I want the interraction to go, and remembering the most positive experiences I have in the past in terms of networking —  times when I met that person who knew the person who knew the person to get me that speaking gig, or when I was able to help someone move forward on a plan, or help connect them to someone that had that valuable piece of information they were looking for. And all the time, being authentic, not cheesy or car-salesman-y!

Networking requires a new paradigm. A new paradigm helps to create a different attitude and perception. If you’ve found yourself asking some of these questions…

How can I push my agenda?

How can I get or keep all the attention on myself?

What can I say to really impress or manipulate?

How can I use each contact to get what I want or need?

How can I crush the competition?

How can I dominate the marketplace?

…your approach, style – and your energy — might be getting in your way or making you appear insincere, desperate or both. Compare the above to the language and attitude and state of mind expressed by these questions:

What can I give and offer to others?

How can I help others to be successful?

How can I start and continue friendly conversations?

How can I put others at ease?

How can I best express my sincerity and generosity?

How can I listen attentively so as to recognize the the needs and desires of others?

How can I provide true value to others?

How can I fully express myself so I can make genuine connections with others?

In short. think “CONNECTING” rather than “NETWORKING!” When we seek to authentically connect, we are usually in a good, honest and giving place and this is often reflected back to us.

Some ways to “Connect”:

·      Invest in long term relationship building.

·      Use Linked-in and social media STRATEGICALLY – there is nothing that compares with face-to-face meetings! (not only to find out about who you are meeting but also about who they know)

·      Stay in touch (this often takes many “touches”)

·      Don’t even think about what the other can do for you, think about how you can help others. It comes back to you.

·      Always do what you say you are going to do – if you promise to get that person a contact, do it right away!

Some Essential “Do’s” and “Don’ts of “Connecting”:

DO:

Offer something when first meeting someone (book suggestion)

·      Start conversation by asking questions

·      Identify two or three things you’d like to learn from the people at the function

DON’T:

·      Try to be cool

·      Don’t let what do you do be first question

·      Don’t complain about networking events

DEVELOP A SUPERSTAR SUPPORT SYSTEM

Another way to stand out in a crowded field is to surround yourself with a “Superstar Support System” (or “network,” if you prefer) – a group of friends and colleagues who will give you honest and instructive feedback about you, while helping you find your best – and most authentic – self. Ask three friends the following questions about you:

·      What are three things that make you memorable?

·      What are your special talents and skills?

·      What have you been good at since you were a kid?

·      What do people always compliment you on?

·      What do you love — or never grow tired of talking about –re: your personal life?

·      What do you want to say that you would never grow tired of talking about when you are asked about your work?

When creating a “Superstar Support System,” ask yourself “What are my core values?” and “How can they enhance my Superstar Network?” Also, if you could add one hundred people from your life to the lives of those with whom you are networking, who would you add? What would their core values be and why would you be assets to one another? Some other key questions:

·      What can I do to improve the financial health of my support system/network?

·      What is the biggest gift/contribution I can bring or make to my network (knowledge, energy)?

·      What kind of positive effect can I have by giving to my network?

·      What kind of thinking can I contribute to others in my network (strategic, creative, analytical, big picture)?

·      What life experiences can I contribute which could create/foster learning in others?

·      What skills, strengths, talents, and knowledge, can I add to my network?

·      How can I enhance the professional image of the people in my network?

·      What books, magazines, and other reference material can I give to others in my network?

So get out there and start connecting.  Meet some people, get away from the computer, shift out of your comfort zone. You never know what can happen!

Ever wonder how other successful public relations executives deal with the same types of situations that you are encountering?

How great would it be if PR practitioners had a place to meet other like-minded individuals to discuss business strategies, share their experiences, and network.

At PR Masterminds — a monthly 90-minute “think-tank” of PR executives, both from the agency and client-side — you will benefit from an environment where camaraderie exists, education flows, knowledge is exchanged, and purpose is achieved.  Fostered in everyone who participates is the insight, awareness, and confidence to grow and develop your public relations business or PR business skills.

Through discussion and participation, solutions are provided to such topics as how to deal with ethical issues working with the press, motivating staff, energy and leadership, working with Millenials, social media opportunities, the agency/client relationship, doing more with less, and working with less stress.

Allow yourself and other PR execs that you know to experience the feeling of relief that comes from having business support, camaraderie and knowing you are no longer  tackling your PR challenges alone.  

Please let me know if you think you might like to know more: PR Masterminds: Great PR minds working together to master their craft

 Balance Mindset, Authentic Leadership

“it’s PR, not ER”

The Power of Coaching

During this interactive workshop, you will hear from me about the field of coaching, the difference between traditional coaching and iPEC’s proprietary Core Energy Coaching process, and our ICF-accredited coach training program. You also get to participate in a Q&A session. If you are thinking of becoming a coach and want to learn about coach training in more detail, then this is a presentation you won’t want to miss.

New York: New York (Manhattan) – Free Seminar!

Presenter: Alan Cohen

Live POC

Date: 09/24/2009
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm Eastern

TRS Inc
44 East 32nd St (Between Park and Madison)
11th Floor
New York 10016

Register here.