If you’re a fan of self-help books and personal development, you may be familiar with positive affirmation.
Positive affirmation is a statement that confirms something to be true. Repeating a positive word or phrase is a proven psychological self-help process especially for changing, adding or removing specific behaviors and habits¹. Jack Canfield, a success coach, even outlined nine (9) guidelines on how to create effective affirmations on his book, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Other experts, like motivational author ²Louise Hay, actually has an audio-book that features positive affirmations.
BENEFITS OF POSITIVE AFFIRMATION
Various experts and studies support the effectiveness of adapting this concept in our daily lives. One website ³cites the following benefits of positive affirmation:
Strengthens muscles.
Increase physical and emotional energy levels.
Brings to life a person’s capabilities, strengths, talents and skills.
Penetrates a person’s subconscious, thus affecting one’s actions, behaviors and attitude.
A simple search of this term on the internet would give you hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who show affirmations really work. Of course, take everything with a pinch of salt. Positive affirmation should not be the be-all-and-end-all of your self-improvement journey. This should just form part of your action plan to achieving your goal of personal growth and success.
PERSONAL AFFIRMATIONS
I really believe that words have power on their own. This is why we should be very careful on what we say to ourselves and to others. Words, when said often enough, inspires belief which then may turn into action and reality.
The following are some of my personal affirmations. You may also create affirmations that are specific to your job or relationships. Hope you may find these useful:
If you’re familiar with John Maxwell’s The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, then you must know about the first law: The Law of Significance. It states that one is too small a number to achieve greatness, thus the importance of forming a team. And how effective this team on achieving the goal depends on the quality of their teamwork and manifesting the other 16 laws.
But what is a team?
In simple words, a team is consists of people who work together to achieve a specific goal. And relationships between people are strengthened and made even more special when they start to work as a team.
Whenever we hear stories of individuals who’ve achieved so much, we’re always fascinated on how they seemingly overcame all the challenges by themselves. But Maxwell proved that notion is wrong. There’s no such thing as self-made man. The Lone Ranger is a myth. And as a Chinese proverb states, “Behind an able man there are always other able men.”
Maxwell also cited some of the reasons some people prefer to work on their goals alone. Factors such as ego, insecurity, naiveté and temperament hinder us from working well with others. But if we’re willing to give ourselves and others the chance, we’ll soon find out that we’re only capable of achieving something of any significance when we start to reach out and ask for help.
The following are the six (6) ways on which we can always benefit from creating a team. These are based from C. Gene Wilkes’ work, Jesus on Leadership:
Teams involve more people, thus affording more resources, ideas and energy than would an individual.
Teams maximize a leader’s potential and minimize their weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses are more exposed in individuals.
Teams provide multiple perspective on how to meet a need or reach a goal, thus devising several alternatives for each situation. Individual insight is seldom as broad and deep as a group’s when it takes on a problem.
Teams share the credit for victories and the blame for losses. This fosters genuine humility and authentic community. Individuals take credit and blame alone. This fosters pride and sometimes a sense of failure.
Teams keep leaders accountable for the goal. Individuals connected to no one can change the goal without accountability.
Teams can simply do more than an individual.
Understanding the significance of working with others is fundamental on achieving success. The rest of the Indisputable Laws of Teamwork would help a leader make the team more efficient and effective in achieving the goal. You may check out the book at Amazon.com.
You may also share this article as an infographic:
We all wish we’re always at 100% – that our energies would never waver or the flames of our passions never dull. But we’re fragile, fallible human beings. There would always be times when we feel down, when our motivation seems to reach a state of hibernation. This situation is perfectly normal and okay. But what’s not okay is to be content in staying low inside that depressing hole.
Whenever everything feels like draining or overwhelming, I’d do one of the activities below to regain my motivation. These are not hard and fast rules and you may find that some doesn’t apply to you. But you can definitely give them a try:
It’s so easy to get lost when you’re so into something. So try and go back to the basics. Dig out that list you created when you first started. On each line, you’re sure to see or remember why you’d committed to doing them in the first place.
Being reminded of the reasons that you’re doing something re-frames the situation and may get you back on track. It may also help you make sense of what’s been happening. It can also help you identify the next step you have to take. And sooner, rather than later, you’ll find that drive to go on.
There are times when fear gets the better of us that it dampens our motivation. But this only happens when we’re so focus on the burdens instead of the benefits, of the opportunities. If we’re able to re-channel our focus and anticipate the good things that may come, we can regain the excitement that we’ve lost. This excitement may just topple fear and will allow us to regain the strength to take the next best step forward.
Sure, we’d like to think that we can take care of our own issues, but reaching out to our support group can never hurt. If nothing else, they can be our greatest source of external motivation. Your support group may include your family, friends or colleagues. They can be the concrete parts of our “whys” or they can be the models we strive hard to become one day. Their love and support may just be the forces that we need to get our drive back.
It may be for a short while or long vacation. But let there be a healthy space between you and your goals. You need time so you can replenish your energy and your inspiration. Taking a step back allows you to see how far you’ve come and how much you’ve accomplished. This also gives you time to strategize. Indulge in a fun activity or go to that place you’ve wanted to go for the longest time. Read a book. Meditate. Pray. Play can also be beneficial. Let that inner kid roam free.
How about you, how do you take your motivation back? Tell us about them on the comments section below.
Businesses know that they can’t be everything to everyone. Focus is key if you want your product/service to remain competitive and relevant. That’s why you should get as close as possible to the market you’d like to serve. Insights on your target market’s behavior and preferences are very important in formulating your marketing or business strategy.
Consumer insights allow you to identify which segment of the market needed your product the most and thus, the more profitable to serve. They also help you create effective and relevant communication materials. This information will ultimately guide your decision on selecting the most efficient channels to deliver your messages and products from.
The following information is an excerpt based on a Yes Lifecycle Marketing survey of more than 1,000 consumers who have received a marketing email in the past year. The company wants the report to serve as a guidebook for marketers looking to reach and engage shoppers from each generation.
You can always find interesting, funny and amazing talks at Ted.com. What follows is a list of my all-time favorites. They span a wide range of disciplines and ideas but you’re sure to benefit from them. If you have time to spare, watch and read on.
The Happy Secret to Better Work
This talk re-frames our perspective on how to achieve happiness. We’re raised to believe that the harder we work, the more successful we get, the happier we become. But Shawn Achor would like to reverse that formula. He says that being happy starts with training the brain to become more positive.
According to his study, “… our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we’ve found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.”
How then can we achieve this happiness advantage? He gives us the following recommendations:
List three new things you’re grateful for 21 days in a row. This way the brain would learn to scan the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.
Journal about your positive experiences so that the brain re-lives the way it feels.
Meditation and exercise.
Random acts of kindness.
Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe
“When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities.” – Simon Sinek
To make your people feel safe and taken care of are signs of good leadership. I couldn’t agree more when he said that when leaders decide to put people first, when they show willingness to sacrifice comforts and tangible results so that people remain and feel safe and feel that they belong, remarkable things happen.
He’s cited two companies who’re so good at this principle and they’re thriving businesses right now. Just imagine working for that particular company that’s willing to keep you for a lifetime.
Also he’s given a damn good definition of leadership. Leadership is never about the rank. Like him, I’ve encountered so many people who occupy higher rungs in a company. They’re people of authority for sure, but definitely not leaders. Leadership is a choice – to go first, to make sacrifices so your people may gain and succeed. And what do leaders gain from all this? It’s the absolute willingness of their people to do the same for them.
Your Elusive Creative Genius
From the author of Eat, Pray, Love, this talk tackles the daunting issue that every artist face after creating their best, most acclaimed work by far: Will they ever surpass their most recent achievement?
This thought is certainly scary and puts a lot of pressure on the artist while getting the “next big work” out there.
According to her, life need not to be full of anguish if you never happen to believe that the most extraordinary aspect of your being comes from you. In some ancient cultures, they have the idea of a disembodied creative creature called genius. While in some places, artists can have that single, transcendent moment when they seem to become a vessel so spectators can have a glimpse of God. And so in recognizing this distance between the artist and the work, artists may be able to retain that sanity, that courage to get on with the work and just stubbornly show up until it is done.
Beautiful Minds Are Free From Fear
Sometimes, fear can be so strong and paralyzing. When it hits, Robert Grant gives the following recommendations on how to overcome fear:
Practice gratitude. It’s impossible to be fearful and grateful at the same time.
Intentional Decision. Anything that can happen to you in your life can either the best or the worst thing. You decide which is which. Every day you wake up, you get to decide whether it’s going to be a good day or a bad day. It’s all up to you.
How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over
Whenever you feel stuck or dissatisfied with your life, Mel Robbins says that you gotta force yourself out of the following:
Out of your head. Most especially when you’re just wallowing on your negative thoughts.
Past your feelings. Because you’re never gonna feel like getting what you want when you’re so focused on your emotions.
Out of your comfort zone. Because that’s where everything starts to happen.
And she says it’s very important to act on our impulse. Because if we don’t marry the impulse with a physical action, we’re going to trigger our emergency break and we’ll never get to do what we want to do in the first place.
You may have your own set of Ted Talks favorites. Put them on the comment section or send them my way so I can add them here.
Most of the time, the combination of right words spoken at the right time is all the encouragement that you need. Whether they be from a fictional character or spoken by someone IRL, the impact that these quotes have can never be underestimated. These quotes have the potential to inspire us, to strengthen us and to make us see from a different perspective.
I’m going to try to update this post every week by adding five (5) quotes every time. Please feel free to drop by every Monday to see the recent uploads.
Think about your possibilities. You are a work in progress. Believe in what you can become.
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. – Lao Tzu
Photo by Marina Vitale
It all starts in believing. You can do anything you set your mind into.
Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes. – Benjamin Disraeli
Photo by Joshua Earle
The past is over and it has no power over you. What matters now is where you intend to go, who you wanted to be.
The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving. – Oliver Wendell Holmes
Photo by Danka & Peter
Keep things in control.
Either you run the day, or the day runs you. – Jim Rohn
Photo by Dai KE
Become the great person you know you can become.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great makes you feel that you, too, can become great. – Mark Twain
Photo by Andrew Worley
Find the best in everybody. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out. – Randy Pausch
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo
So the braver you are, the more life is there for you.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. – Anais Nin
Photo from Unsplash.com
You are here to heal your life.
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. – Pema Chodron
Photo from Unsplash.com
Do you want it badly enough that you’re ready to do everything just to get pass the brick wall?
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people. – Randy Pausch
Photo from Canva.com
It your life. You’re in charge. Take the lead.
To achieve major success in life, you must accept 100% responsibility for your life and results. Nothing less will do. – Jack Canfield
Photo from Unsplash.com
I’ve recently had a career change. I moved to Operations from being in Admin for about three years. It’s not so far off from my previous position, though instead of calculating growth and creating plans to increase market share, I went to giving out solutions on how customers can take better care of their credit cards accounts. (I never thought I’d be debt collector, ever! I personally hate debts!)
Anyway, I made all the considerations before I applied for my current job – the working hours, industry culture, some pay cuts. But I know, I’m not the only career shifter who’s having the occasional blues. Sometimes, I really miss working late into the night, the nonstop follow-ups, as well as going around town to make sure that people know about my brand. I just really miss the ‘going-out’ part the most. I find the walls of my current office suffocating sometimes and I really like to get away. Then I’ll remind myself of the reasons I’m right here.
So, for those who have recently change careers, I hope the following reminders would be helpful to you. Whenever I feel the urge to leave or become sad or miss the life I left behind, these are what I think about:
1. The “Why” of the Career Change.
We’ll all have our reasons. Reasons we deemed valid and important and urgent. We wouldn’t take all the risks and accept trade-offs if our reason is not worth betting on. You must always go back to that. And remember that changing careers is like starting over, drawing square one. And I’m sure even before you went to that first job interview, you’re mind’s made up. This is what you wanted to do. Be thankful now that you got it. Live it. Focus on the opportunities. Remember, it’s your win because you get to start over. Some people never even had their chance.
2. The 3 A’s – Adjust Aptitude and Attitude.
You’ve had work experience, learning curve is not some strange, new concept for you. You know you got to adjust, it’s either you’ve got to shave off or gain an edge so you can follow on this new track. You have to gain skills, and that means learning, which also means it’d take time and patience and effort and love. You got to develop genuine love for what you’re doing. It’s the only way, it’s the only way you can succeed. That would depend much on the attitude that you’ll bring into the job. Keep the enthusiasm, keep being interested. Learn. Never stop. Reach out. Ask. But remember to do your own research, too. There’s just too much that people can teach you.
3. Reach Goals.
Of course, you’ve got to measure up. Determine what you’re aiming for. Break them down so you can work on them on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. Challenging yourself to surpass the minimum requirement of the passing scores will keep you motivated. Also, you may look at it as an indication of how flexible your skills are.
Focus on building the new.
4. New Connections.
Your new environment gives you the opportunity to connect with new sets of people – different backgrounds, expertise and culture, even. And being around these people can be really exciting, though intimidating some of the time. But it’s going to bring you new experiences and joy. It’s going to expand your relationships and it opens possibilities for friendships, mentor-ship and inspirations. People can really be awesome. And if you just wait long enough, they’d surprise you.
You may also have your own set of reminders for a successful career change. We’d like to hear them. Please free to leave a comment below.
Possibilities spell out the likelihood of an event or thing from happening. You can also say that they prelude changes. And like life itself, possibilities aren’t just about dealing with solid negative or flat-out positive outcomes. They’re also filled with gray areas. After all, nobody ever has 100% information every time.
Instead of freezing up in the face of possibilities, here’s what you can do:
1. Get your facts straight.
You got to establish the premise that the possibility can exist at all. Look at the proof or evidence. How do they support or disprove the possibility? Though intuition can get you far, hard facts and evidences keep you grounded on reality and help you come up with a sensible plan.
2. Pick your stance.
Your attitude toward possibilities depends on their impact to your life. This means that you’re most likely to act indifferent if the possibility is less likely to happen and if it happens, it wouldn’t affect you that much. This is a case of live and let live.
It gets trickier though, when a possibility is more likely to happen and can greatly affect your life. You have to think about how the outcome can be an advantage or a disadvantage to you. Of course, when you identify it as an advantage, you may be excited or overjoyed! But if it’s a disadvantage, you may be frightened and anxious. These emotions are understandable, but useless. The possibility is more likely to happen, anyway. So you better get your act together.
3. Develop a plan and stick to it.
Whether it’s a positive or negative outcome, you need a plan on how to face the situation when it happens. When you identify the possibility as an advantage, determine how you can maximize it. Will it so that others can benefit from it as well. Express gratitude and infect others with positivism.
If the possibility would have an adverse effect, brace yourself. Identify the specific aspect of your life that will be hit the most. Is there any way to limit or minimize its effect? Determine the time frame that you’ll be working on. This will help you set priorities. You can also ask for help. In times when you don’t have enough answers, look for people who can fill in the blanks for you. You’ll never be 100% ready, so leave a room for faith. Everything does work at the end, but the essence of the plan is to carry you through it all so that you can reach the end.
In both cases, practice caution. Great expectations over possibilities with great advantages may lead to misery when they unfold in ways you failed to anticipate. And to fill your days with anxiety is to miss on other awesome things that life can offer. As always, thanks for dropping by!
Toxic people are the unnecessary crazies at work. Spending even a minute with them zap your energy. Hearing them talk rile up feelings that are mostly negative. For them, everything is big deal. There’s not an office hour when you can skip their drama. In extreme cases when they tend to be hurtful, they make you feel like your existence is the smallest, most insignificant of all. You don’t want to do anything or be around with them but they’re part of your team.
Posts on how to deal with toxic people at work just abounds. You can at least find a dozen ways on how to handle these people. Most of them are all about protecting yourself. They go on about establishing a limit or making yourself less vulnerable. It’s like: Never reach out to toxic people at work, period.
Or is it? Taking it from a team leader or a concerned team member’s perspective, how’d you go about helping a toxic team member to change?
I tried a quick search on how you can help a team member change their toxic behavior. I’ve encountered some self-confessed toxic people and how they eventually changed. According to them, it’s all about self-awareness – recognizing the signs that you’re becoming a toxic person and initiating changes that mostly include therapy and restraint. (Whoa, therapy sounds so serious!) I’d like to think that they are what Randy Pausch would call recovering jerks in his book, “The Last Lecture”.
Workplace Interventions for Toxic People
This info-graphic from GetVOIP might be a good springboard on the interventions that the management can do to change toxic employee’s behavior. It may be applicable for both subordinates and managers:
Interventions for Toxic People Using Emotional Intelligence Approach
If you want a lengthy study on toxic managers, this article by Roy Lubit may be really insightful. The article aims to help senior management identify toxic managers so they can distinguish those who can still be coached and therefore, retain, and those who they need to let go. He argues that to effectively deal with toxic people, you need to understand where they’re coming from. Uncovering their objectives will help you design interventions accordingly. He emphasizes the importance of developing emotional intelligence so it can help you reign in your feelings and behaviors, rather than letting the feelings run away with you.
In his article, there are four types of toxic managers:
Narcissistic
Aggressive
Rigid
Impaired
Each type comes in several varieties. The author put each in a table so personal traits and objectives can easily be identified. He also put in recommendations on how to deal with each type, both for when you’re a subordinate or a superior.
I may not always agree on the recommendations, especially the ones for subordinates. Most of it seemed to lean on downplaying performance or avoiding provocation. But to senior management, it can be a good springboard on how to reach out to once well-performing managers who devolved into being a toxic boss.
If you can share any tips on how to reach out to a colleague or a boss who’s become toxic, put them in the comment below.
The One Minute Manager has arguably oversimplified management principles and focused a bit too much on dealing with subordinates at work. Yet, it’s allegorical style and use of ordinary words rendered it a very easy read. The principles presented are also practical and adaptable.
It rests on the idea that people and results go hand in hand. This means that how you treat your people greatly impacts your bottom line. Therefore, it’s extremely important to deal with them in the proper way. The book highlights the significance of setting goals/expectations and how to give out praises and reprimands.
If you’re in a middle management position, I recommend grabbing a copy of this book. You’ll find that the scenarios presented are relevant and it wouldn’t take too much of your time.
A word of caution though. Never take the title of this book literally.The One Minute Manager is just an expression, an attempt to put away the idea that a management position is one of the most complex and difficult there is. I’d like to think that this book is a sort of initiation, an intro that touches mostly on how to deal with people.
Here are the three most important points in the book that can help you become a One Minute Manager:
The One Minute Goal Setting
First, set expectations clear and straight. Goals need to be brief and mutually agreed upon. It must only have 250 characters or less and can be read in a minute. Identify the behaviors that will lead to the achievement of the goals. Review the goals time and again and check whether the behaviors matches the goals.
Be upfront with your people.
The One Minute Praise
Your people want to know how they’re doing at work so it’s important that you give them immediate feedback. Try to catch them when they’re doing things right. Specify the good behavior and commend them for it. Pause a bit so that the good feeling sinks in. Gestures like shaking hands or touching the shoulders may be good ways of reinforcing your message. But take care that the gesture makes your people comfortable and your touch, sincere.
Catch your people doing things right.
The One Minute Reprimand
Giving out reprimands has two parts. First part includes reprimanding people immediately. Specifically point out the bad behavior and express how you honestly feel about it. Let there be an uncomfortable silence in between so that the situations sinks in.
The second part include reaching out to person and sincerely expressing you’re still on their side. Make them understand that this is about their work performance and not them as a person. Finally, when the reprimand is over, it’s over. Don’t ever bring it up again.
A person’s behavior does not equal his or her worth.
Though it’s hardly a quick-guide to all things management, The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard Ph.D. and Spencer Johnson M.D. shows you practical steps on how to deal with people better. Parents also have found the principles useful when raising their children.
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