The Princess & The Pea

The Princess and the Pea

The Princess and the Pea

FREE Career Advice in Real time!!

Are you frustrated with your career progress? Are you confused with what steps to take next? Join us on Purple Cloud Careers, https://www.facebook.com/purplecloudcareers a page dedicated to troubleshooting careers issues and sharing information. Please like us and join us in the conversation…..

Please NOTE!!! Every Tuesday from 18h00 -19h00 we will be discussing careers and their problems in Real Time ….

We all have careers – whether we are self-employed or work for others. Our career is the tool we use to earn our daily bread. It is also the way society defines us whether we like it or not ….the first thing people ask as is “What do you do?’ A career serves as a means for self-expression and self-actualisation. Finally we spend most of our lives working therefore it makes sense that we take time to think about what we want to spend our lives doing and how we want to do it. .

Career Intelligence is the number ONE skill required for success in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous workplace. Whether you are 20 something at the Exploration Career Stage, a 30 something at the Establishment Career Stage, a 40 something at the Maintenance or Transition Career Stage and even a 50 something Plus at the Disengagement Legacy Stage, career tips, tricks and tools will help improve your work life and thus increase the quality of your life

Come and join the conversation and share your wins and your worries with us …. if you cant make the time just drop your query on the Purple Cloud Career Page and we will respond to you asap …..

Begin 2014 on a Positive Note …. and get the results you deserve….

The Ant and the Corporation …. Talent Management Gone Wrong ….

Talent Management is more than just hiring more people, deploying them in clearly defined jobs, measuring their performance and rewarding them; talent management happens when people’s ability, particularly people’s managerial and leadership ability, is optimised to create the most strategic value ……by integrating the recruitment, the training and the retention tactics to maximise investment…

Here is a story of how talent management can go very, very wrong ……………

https://www.slideshare.net/FrancesKazan/the-ant-and-the-corporation-talent-management-gone-wrong/edit?src=slideview

Are you in a corporate leadership position or leading your own business??

Then you must be feeling the pressure of Competition, Change and Chaos, continuous, challenging and unrelenting ….

Here is a great tool to help relieve your stress….

http://youtu.be/8weSOUXsecU

Did you find this helpful??? Leave us a comment …

The Art and Science of Presenting to Executives!!

“http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/13959919”

http://www.slideshare.net/speakingppt/5-tips-for-presenting-to-executives-1395991″

The Power of Speech

Future is not where you are going to go..but what you are going to create!” Nancy Duarte believes that ideas are the most powerful tools people have. Her passion is to help every person learn to communicate their world-changing idea effectively. Nancy Duarte is an expert in presentation design and principal of Duarte Design, where she has served as CEO for 21 years. Nancy speaks around the world, seeking to improve the power of public presentations. She is the author of Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. Her most recent book, Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, was published in 2010.

From the “I have a dream” speech to Steve Jobs’ iPhone launch, all great presentations have a common architecture. At TEDxEast, Nancy Duarte draws lessons on how to make a powerful call-to-action.

http://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks.html#.Ty-2BLNN2UQ.email

www.hitw.co.za

 

 

I dare you…..

How to Reboot your Groundhog Day Existence

The time has come to revel in the successful accomplishments of another year because no matter how stressful the year has been, we have had many wins….and we should salute the glory ….. and continue on our road to prosperity and progress, elevating our human spirit…

Goal Scorecard – Satisfied or Unsatisfied?
It is also the time to review our current situation, qualitatively weighing our scorecard – comparing our sense of progress against our sense of achievement … resulting in the net evaluation ….. Are we dissatisfied (unhappy and frustrated) or just unsatisfied (driven to achieve more)???? Those who make things happen will feel unsatisfied whereas those who watch things happen will probably feel dissatisfied and discouraged…. and those who wonder what happened? …. Well who knows how they feel…. Perhaps they feel nothing at all………………….

I vacillate between being dissatisfied and unsatisfied ……

Groundhog Day-
Every year this time the movie Groundhog Day comes to mind. Phil (Bill Murray) an egocentric, calculating,  Scrooge like  weather forecaster is caught up in a time loop of limited consequences, which means that no matter how he behaves, hedonistic or even suicidal, he is condemned to wake up to the same day over and over again. Until he is prepared to allow his suffering and the fear of near death encounters to be felt deeply, he remains stuck living semi-automatically, in a looping day. Phil is a man exiled from his feelings, arrogant, sarcastic and totally absorbed with his own discomforts, cut off from others, unable to learn and grow from any type of feedback because he believes that he is a plaything of fate. The only way he can liberate himself from a looping day is by converting from a negative reactor of fate to becoming a positive pro-actor of change. He eventually learns how to do this, becoming a more compassionate, authentic self in which intimacy and creativity come naturally and thus is able to get out of his loop of despondency.

It is only recently that I began to realise how many of my limiting beliefs are keeping me rooted in my Groundhog Day … what about you??

Adapt to changing or die!
Are you living your own Groundhog Day, refusing to adapt to a rapidly changing world? Are you ignoring the consequence of global competition to your survival and ultimately to your success? Today getting a job is easier than keeping it, therefore performing at your best at all times is as important, if not more important, than ‘who you know’ or ‘what you know’. Hence you need to work from a position of strength, from your core or natural abilities, reinforced with learning, and adapted into an offering or a work related identity, which must be redesigned periodically to remain in tune and in touch, holding life-long relevance, or else you are dead in the water!

Your job, my job, everybody’s job exists purely because a customer need has surfaced and someone has to satisfy it – directly through sales, or indirectly through accounting. Adapting to the new products and new technologies that pop up continuously is of paramount importance in our effort to satisfy customers and to continue to prosper… and for that we need feedback… from customers, from managers, from peers……

Feedback – Your Weapon of Mass Sensation – Feel the Feelings!
Feedback is a powerful tool that when used correctly can improve performance by allowing you to evaluate your delivery. Heeding advice, criticism, and the views of those you respect, is a necessary pre-requisite to learning – and true learning can only be created when feelings are allowed to respond fully to feedback. These feelings, pain and pleasure, are the navigators into unchartered waters. Having the courage to feel your own suffering and discomfort can transform you to a new state to transcend the repetition, the looping of your Groundhog Day. Don’t be afraid to laugh, to cry, to walk the walk of shame…. That is the only way that you can change your paradigm, to grow out of the unending cycle of pain and misery, to stop running on the same spot over and over, again and again, and to get to where you want to be.
Have the courage to respond appropriately to your world, to fully experience your feelings, to allow your sensations to become conscious. Feelings are your software and once you have brought them to the surface, once you have fully felt them, you need to reboot…..

Mental Nudge – Reboot or Rewind? What is the Difference?
We all need a mental nudge to turn our focus on empowering activities. A do-over is something we all want, a second chance, to start over, hopefully more consciously, more awareness, do things better and faster. We can’t go back in time because in the words of Heraclitus, ‘no man can walk into the same river twice, because he is not the same man and it is not the same river’, everything and everyone changes. Getting a second chance means taking another shot, learning from feedback and applying new learning in the new circumstances with new hope for success, in other words rebooting, rather than rewinding that is, doing the same things and expecting a different results

Although rebooting and rewinding sound the same they are substantially different. Rewinding means we are playing the same thing over again, even though the circumstances change, without changing the self, not factoring our lessons learned from experiences and feedback, responding in a way that keeps us looping into a Groundhog Day existence. Rebooting on the other hand, means we restart but this time our experiences, both painful and pleasurable, are absorbed, modifying our knowledge and beliefs, aligning new learning, adapting our actions, and getting unstuck from our Groundhog Day, and moving forward. Rebooting aligns any conflict between body and mind, heart and soul, often the cause of inaction, preventing you from breaking the unending cycle of the status quo. In contrast, rewinding or repeating our anticipated stance does not work as we continue to repeat our inappropriate response to the circumstances in our life…..
Although a reboot does not recharge your batteries it certainly allows them to work more efficiently.
And the best time to reboot is NOW! This time of year between Christmas and New Year is the rebooting season, filled with all its rituals of rebirth, focusing on compassion for others, and a more altruistic existence, is a perfect time for renewing ourselves. Feedback in the form of confession was very much part of this ritual, has fallen away, very much conspicuous by its absence. It is not surprising that without the guidance of meaningful feedback so many people focus on superficial changes like getting fitter, acquiring more education, building better networks, which are certainly important, but contribute little meaningful change to their lives. Rebirth requires more than changing a few habits or acquiring more skills, it requires changing our mental filters, our limiting beliefs, our self-centred stereotypical view of others; it means assisting fate in giving us what we need in order to get what we want.

We all want to be given another chance to respond more appropriately to the condition of our life however unless were are willing to feel our disappointments and our hurts, the second chance becomes a rewind rather than a reboot, stuck in the past, allowing a recursion of time, and rehashing the same results. A rewind does not improve anything, just repeats what went before, whereas a reboot allows you to operate at a faster, clearer, more energised manner and renewed effort, realigning your aspirations, refresh your offering, and redesigning your strategy to get to where you need to be.

Everyone needs to reboot, whether you are aging into the formal workplace or aging out of it.

Conclusion

The new workplace is tough, unrelenting, and requires having a grip on what is important and of paramount concern to all of us. The most important items in your career toolbox are competence and desire for performance excellence. Nothing is more powerful on a CV than a proven track record of brilliance. As a productivity evangelist, I would like to suggest that 2012 becomes the year of Excellence in South Africa. We are ALL collectively and individually responsible for building this country, we should therefore pledge our commitment to work hard, to do our best and to do it with a sufficient thrust to make a real difference. Let us accept feedback without playing the race, or gender card. Let us get out of our Groundhog Day and move forward. Let us reboot and change the way we look at ourselves… from ‘having’ to ‘doing’- from having ‘paper qualifications’ to ‘delivering excellence’, on time, every time…. From having a title of leader to doing what effective leaders do and build and energise teams ….. Whether in government or private sector, teaching or street sweeping, young or old, black or white, each person can make a difference… that is the true spirit of peace on earth…..

May we all have a prosperous and performance excellent year……

YOU’VE MADE YOUR BED, NOW LIE IN IT

Back to  HITW Talent Management   www.hitw.co.za

Making my bed every morning has a number of benefits: starts my day positive, effective and productive. There are days, especially when I am in a hurry when I don’t have time to make my bed properly; I don’t shake the fitted sheet or smooth out the wrinkles and tuck in the corners. I just pull on the duvet and readjust the pillows. Sure my room looks neat and tidy, but guess what…….. when I get into bed that night, I have a restless sleep. So you would think that I would learn never to cut corners when making my bed….. isn’t that what a reasonable person would do? Learn from our mistakes? Make better decisions so that we can better deal with their consequences – invest FIVE MINUTES more making my bed so that we can earn EIGHT HOURS in restful and pleasant sleep. As an intelligent human being would it not be fair to say that one night in a badly made bed would be enough to help me make better choices for my actions regarding my bed-making, especially knowing that I have to lie in it? So why is it that now and again I jeopardise my sleep…… by my unproductive behaviour?
Productivity equals value divided by time – the time put in to get something of value out. I don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that five minutes of my time gives me a huge return, eight hours of restful sleep, which is out of proportion with the investment of five minutes…. So why do I keep up my corner cutting and jeopardising my sleep?
The answer lies in how I have programmed myself to react in those “make it happen” moments – the many micro behaviours that I am continuously involved in ……those moments that make such a huge impact on the quality of my life………. ‘making the bed’ moments ………. ‘putting one more biscuit in my mouth’ moment …… ‘letting the insulting word out’ moment ….. ‘allowing that negative thought into my space’ moment …….
We all believe that our life will change when we get the right job, the right intimate partner, the right house ……… the right money ……. etc….. what we learn, however, is that our life really changes in those ‘make it happen’ moments ……. the moments when we decide to make the bed properly……. the moments when we decide to prepare a healthy meal ….. the moment when we decide to stop a negative word coming out of our mouths …….
I believe that the quality of my life is determined not by the amount of money I make, not by my status in the community, nor even my relationships, intimate or otherwise. The quality of my life is determined by those moments when I make those micro decisions that have such a huge impact on my life …… because it is those moments when my true character shines through ……… it is those ‘make it happen moments’ that show me who I really am…. not who I think I am ….. or who others think I am …….
It is those micro decisions we make continuously that create the twists and turns of our life ……. because we all suffer the consequences of what we do ….. whether we believe it or not ……. we make our beds and then lie in them ……