Are you the change agent in your life?

Are you the change agent in your life? - Rolê em Vila Velha - Praia de Itapoã (Photo credit: Lia Scarton Carreira)

You are living in turbulent times just like all of us are. The amount of change you are experience in your work as well as your personal life is much greater than what your ancestors might have experienced. 

Hence change management is not just for organizations; it is also for you and your family too. Change management is one of the most important skills you need to do day in day out. 

It is very vital that you add the role of a change agent to all other roles you are playing. The role of a change agent is a very important role, and a role that you will have to play throughout your life.
 

The definition of a change agent: Change agent is a person who will facilitate the change within an organization or a team. 

Applying this definition to your life you need to find out who is in charge of change management in your life?

Who is the change agent in your life? Have you ever thought about this very important subject? Many people have consciously or unconsciously abdicated this role to others.

Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself to ensure effective change management in your life:

• Are you aware of the concept of change management?
• Who is the change agent in your life?
• Who are the people who are calling the shots in your life?
• How many times have you played the role of a change agent in your life?

Playing the role of a change agent means that you are taking charge of your life and being responsible for all aspects of your life. It is one of the most important roles you will ever play.

Here is an exercise for you to do after you read this post. 

Take an inventory of all the events that have brought about major changes in your life and make a detailed list of them. Ask yourself how many of these change events you actively participated as a change agent? You may be surprised at the results!

Take charge and be the change agent in your life! 

 

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Role model

Role model-Who is your Role Model? (Photo credit: MARUYAMA Takahiro)

A role model can lead you to success or failure. Have you ever paused and checked how many role models you follow? It is a very useful exercise. 

Before you read any further make a role model list of all the people who have influenced you silently. You must start from your earliest memory. 

Against each of the names, you have come up with write the influence he or she has had on you. Put a cross mark on all the people who have influenced you negatively.

Ask yourself the following questions:

How many of the people you listed do you follow as a role model?

• Which role model has had the maximum impact on you?
• Which role model has the most negative influence on you?
• What are the impacts of each role model on your current behavior, aspirations and goals?
• Which role model do you want to stop imitating?
• Which role model do you want to start imitating more intensely?

Bad role model consequences:

• Bad role model can create bad habits in you
• Bad role model can destroy your self-esteem
• Bad role model can have negative influence on you lifelong
• Bad role model often works silently leading you to failure

Do a thorough analysis and you will be amazed at how many decisions you have taken in the past either consciously or unconsciously imitating role models. Don't let negative role models lead you to by lanes of failure.

This exercise will also alert you to be careful while imitating others in the future.

A role model is very essential for everyone. This is especially true if you have children. 

Ensure that your child is always having a role model that will inspire him or her to success.

Related articles

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Competitive advantage

Competitive Advantage (Image by Getty Images via @daylife)

Ten powerful tips for competitive advantage for your company. 

How do you get a competitive advantage and make the products and/or services of your company sell like hot cakes? You may be a head of a start up company or a seasoned CEO of a large company wanting to create breakthrough products that will bring a lot of revenue for your company. 

There is a way to nurture and evolve your product to the point that it gets a mind of its own and grows in sales exponentially. An example of such a product is Facebook. In this highly changing global environment the half-life of your competitive advantage is very short.
 

Here are some tips that will get you started and help you to maintain and increase your competitive advantage :

1. Acknowledge that your product can be improved in different ways
2. Listen to your customer for clues of the kind of value addition they are looking for
3. If it is a new product, allow at least six months to one year for the concept of the product to evolve
4. Be aware of the product and scan the environment constantly
5. Capture all the ideas with respect to the product-good, bad, and brilliant
6. Piggy back on others invention
7. Whenever you come across a new idea, an invention, or a market immediately try to correlate it to your product
8. Nurture, modify and finalize the product after preset attempts
9. Trust your intuition to tell you when your product is ready for the launch or the redesign
10. Take these steps and give yourself sufficient time to evolve the product into something your competitor will find it very difficult to emulate.

The same steps can be applied to a service offering.

I would recommend a training program to start you on this journey and get you quick results.

You can get the training program here: 

http://ude.my/wNUYps

Start applying this to a select number of products in your company, and you will find that your competitive advantage soaring high. 

This approach should become a part of your long term strategy to develop and maintain your competitive advantage.

Conflict avoidance with loved ones.

Conflict avoidance with loved ones.

Do you frequently get into conflict situations with your loved ones? If your answer is affirmative, then you need to take stock of what is happening. While it is good to bring out differences in the open and resolve conflict situations, it is also necessary to strive for conflict avoidance. 


Conflict avoidance means those conflict situations that arise because of your negligence and carelessness. 


Here are some typical examples of negligence: 

• Forgetting to cap the toothpaste 
• Forgetting to say, “Good Morning” if that is your habit 
• Not informing that you are coming home late 
• Not keeping your promises 
• Not listening when your spouse is talking to you 
• Saying, “No” without thinking 

The list can go on. What you need to do is come up with a list like the one above. It is a good idea to keep a log book to note down all the triggers that precipitate conflict situations. 


After observing for a week or two you will be able to consolidate the main reasons for the conflict. This list of main reasons can be used for conflict avoidance.


Once you have an accurate list, you can begin to examine it carefully. Apply the Pareto Principle if the list is a long one.  What are the 20% of the causes that trigger 80% of the conflict situations? 


Choose three items from the prioritized list and begin to work upon them for conflict avoidance. 


You will very soon see the magic that begins to happen in terms of this strategy of conflict avoidance. 

Focused Attention: Twelve Powerful Tips for a laser focus.

Focused Attention: Twelve Powerful Tips for a laser focus.

Having a focused attention is difficult now-a-days, especially if you are working on a computer with Internet connectivity. It is easy to get tempted by millions of things you can do on the Internet and lose your focused attention.

The ability of people to have a laser focus is premium, and it is one skill that will be worthwhile for you to develop.

Here are some tips you can use right away to develop focused attention:

1. Switch off the Internet while working on a computer
2. Close your email while you are working on something
3. Have in front of you two or three major things you want to accomplish before you start the day
4. Unless it is an emergency be ruthless about your appointment with yourself
5. Reward yourself after you accomplish every pre-determined project or task
6. Set a goal to accomplish at least one pre-determined task every day
7. Learn meditation and practice it
8. Allot a specific time during the day for social networking and be ruthless about it
9. Tell your friends, peers, and others that you are busy and can meet them only later
10. Train the people around you to respect your “accomplishing time”
11. Determine whose call you will take and whose calls you will ignore
12. Avoid answering your cell phone at all cost

All these steps will help you to get that focused attention you will need to succeed in any area of life. Getting into the habit of having laser focus and maintaining it will give you a competitive advantage that is difficult to duplicate.

In all life's endeavours a habit that will give you success is the ability to get and maintain a laser focus. This is one skill that is not taught in schools, and you will have to develop it on your own.

Always monitor whether you are having that laser focus to attain your goals. Good Luck to you.

Human Resources - Twelve easy steps to get a dream job?



Human Resources - Twelve easy steps to get a dream job?

Are you bored with your current job or even your career? Whatever be your status, this post will set you thinking in the right direction and show you steps to get the dream job you want. 

The last place to seek help is your human resources department. While the human resources department is very useful for many other things, it is less helpful for finding you a dream job.

Every human resources department of every company is set to guide you based on the organization’s agendas around which it operates. Hence, your human resources department has its own limitations.

Let’s first define a dream job:

A dream job is one that will wake you up in the morning. It is a job you will be obsessed about. A dream job will make you work 24/7, and you will still feel fresh.

If you ask your human resources department for guidance, they will not have such a job for you. If they have, then you are lucky, and you need to grab it.

If you are bored with your job, then there is a good chance that it is not aligned to your vision of an ideal job.

The usual ways' people arrive at their jobs are given below:

• Chance played a major role in their choice
• They took a job their friends went after
• Parental guidance led them to take their current job
• They got locked into a job based on what they studied in college
• They took the job solely for the money it offered

Well, the list can go on and on. About, 80% of your company’s employees would have landed their jobs based on above routes. This is the reason why your human resources department finds it so difficult to motivate employees and keep them motivated.

Given below are some steps you can take immediately to land yourself a dream job.

Here are the steps:

1. Accept that, your job is boring and stop rationalizing about it
2. Go to a quiet place and write for 5 minutes the kind of job that will excite you based on the definition given in  this post
3. Be bold and challenge everything while you write about  your dream job
4. Write about your dream job without any limitations in your mind
5. Revisit what you have written after a day or two.
6. Finalize the dream job write up after a week.
7. Draw up an action plan for getting your dream job
8. Consider re-skilling if necessary
9. Determine a deadline for getting your dream job
10. Network with people who are already in your dream job
11. Land your dream job
12. Celebrate

You may be able to get a your dream job quickly, or it may take you a few years depending on your situation. However, you will find that is not only the dream job that will excite you but also the very journey to reach your dream job that will be fulfilling.

Once you land your dream job then you can tell the human resources department the real reason you are quitting, which is boredom. Hopefully, you will set them thinking.

Get quick wins in every endeavour!

Get quick wins in every endeavour!

A quick wins mindset is very important if you want to demonstrate success to yourself or others. If you have a quick wins mindset then you will strive for it in every endeavour .

What are the advantages of a quick wins mindset? 

A quick win will: 

• Build your confidence
• Build trust rapidly 
• Demonstrate that you are heading for success
• Build your morale
• Build your teams' morale
• Lay a strong foundation for success
• Will delight your customer
• Will delight your boss

How do you develop a mindset that will help you to have a quick win every endeavour?

Here are some tips to get a mindset to develop quick win outcomes in every endeavour:

1. Develop an affirmation, write it down and read it daily
2. Search for opportunities in every endeavour for a immediate wins
3. Before embarking on any outcome have a "quick win pause"
4. Ask the quick win question in your team meetings-"Can we identify any rapid wins as we are developing a plan of action?"
5. Develop a separate tracking mechanism to monitor progress
6. Have a critique periodically and take course corrections
7. Generate a  report of success and share it with your team and your boss
8. Reward yourself for success in the endeavour
9. Celebrate every accomplishment either alone or with your team

Developing  quick win habits, norms and culture are very important and every leader and manager should strive for them. Consistent effort in developing a quick win culture will crown every endeavour as a success. Go for quick wins from this moment.

  

I strongly recommend this audio set and the book!

Get it here:

 

Time Travel-Ten Powerful Tips To Stop Imagining A Bleak Future!

Time Travel-Ten Powerful Tips to Stop Imagining A Bleak Future!

Do you constantly time travel in your mind to a dark future with bleak future prospects for yourself? Do you imagine things going wrong? May be your boss just called you and wants to have a word with you and you begin to imagine negative things happening .You time travel into the meeting in your mind and cascade one negative event after the other until you get completely stressed out.
If this time travel is a recurring habit then you need to get rid of it as it will cause a lot of tension for you. Almost all the negative predictions never come true and you get unnecessarily stressed.

How do you stop imagining negative things happening in the future? Here are some very powerful tips to stop such pessimistic time travel in your mind:

1. Get the negative thought out of your head on to the paper
2. Examine the negative thought and label it as a distortion
3. Check the likelihood of the event happening on a scale of one to ten
4. Attack the negative thought on paper and substitute it with a positive one
5. Share the negative thought with a trusted friend
6. Make a list of all the negative thoughts you have had in the recent past to feel amazed of how you fool yourself
7. Keep this list handy and add the current negative thought to that list
8. Examine all the factors within your control that can be acted upon to prevent the faint possibility of your negative thought coming true
9. Remember all the tight situations you were in the past and how well you handled them
10. Re-affirm the confidence in yourself about your capability of handling any type of crisis, leave alone this puny negative thought and prediction

These powerful steps can completely destroy the negative thought and help you to deal with any situation confidently. It will also help you to break the ill effects of time travel into a gloomy imagined future.

Time Wasters - Ten Easy Steps To Tackle Them!

Time Waters-Ten Easy Steps To Tackle Them!

How do you feel right now? Are there time wasters eating up your day? How has the day gone by so far?

If your answer is yes to the fact that there are lots of time wasters making you unproductive, then you need to take action immediately. The more alert you are to the endless possibilities of time wasters, the easier it will be for you to avoid them.

You have wasted the day if you have the following symptoms:

• You have a nagging feeling that you did not accomplish much
• You have a feeling that you did not do work that will contribute to yourself or others
• You spent hours on FaceBook, Twitter or any other social-networking sites
• You are stressed.
• There is a deadline coming up, and you have done nothing about.
• You have missed the deadline, and this is happening frequently.
• You are doing only work given to you by others.

 The list can go on as there are endless opportunities of wasting time on any given day. How do you stop these time wasters from grabbing your attention? Here are some tips to do just that:

  

1. Take an inventory of time wasters
2. Set out clearly what you want to accomplish for the day
3. Take stock of what goal you can pursue on a particular day keeping in mind the unplanned demands that come to you.
4. Write on a Post It or anywhere the goal you have selected to pursue
5. Start working on the goal even if you have to work only for ten minutes at the earliest opportunity.
6. Continuously come back to the goal after tackling important interruptions if any.
7. Keep doing this until you have accomplished your goal
8. Reward yourself
9. Select a new goal
10. Continue applying these steps

 You will be amazed at how much you can accomplish in a day. Take stock at the end of the month you will be very pleased at how much you have accomplished.

Fifteen Powerful Tips to Make Your New Year Resolution Stick!

New Year Resolution

It is that time of the year when you are making New Year resolution. It may be that you want to exercise regularly, or give up smoking, or to eliminate a bad habit such as procrastination.

It is easy to identify a New Year Resolution but very difficult to make it stick. Most of the people will give up after a few days or few months You need a lot of motivation to keep your New Year Resolution stick.

However many people do not realize that taking action often leads to motivation rather than just waiting for motivation to show up for them.

Given below are few tips to make your New Year Resolution stick:

1. Start small
2. Determine what is success and what is a failure ( If you exercise daily it is a great success if you do not exercise even twice a week it is a failure)
3. Determine the point in your effort beyond which it is a failure ( Example: the minimum amount of exercise to name it as a success is three times a week)
4.  Do not try to be perfect.
5. Allow yourself permission for failure
6. Do not go on an all-or-nothing mode.
7. Reward yourself periodically for motivation
8. Plan your rewards-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and at the en of the year
9. Team up with others who are trying to get their New Year Resolution through.
10. Be kind to yourself
11.  Identify a person who will encourage you and also warn you.
12. Create a review mechanism
13. Determine the frequency of the review
14. Review with a friend
15. Take corrective actions

Try these powerful tips and very soon you will be celebrating and feeling good because your motivation will stay with you through out the year.

Your New Year Resolution will be so successful that others will come to you for help.

Learning Secret- The Biggest Of Them All



Learning Secret - The Biggest Of Them All

What is the biggest learning strategy among all other learning strategies you can use? Have you ever admired people who have learnt something to the point of near perfection? There is one major difference between people who learn things to perfection and the rest of the world.

 

The one thing they have and most of the other people don’t have is a trait called persistence. There are many learning strategies. However, persistence is the most important of them all. Most of the people give up easily as the learning curve becomes steeper.

 

The question you need to ask yourself is the following: How quickly do I give up before I attain near perfection? A good way to find out is to look back and check out how much stuff you pursued and gave up when the going got tough.

 

Some of the common pursuits people give up are given below:

 

1. Math
2. Photography
3. Dancing
4. Karate
5. Playing a musical instrument
6. Making a presentation
7. Public speaking
8. Clinching a sales deal
9. Composing a poem
10. Writing a book
11. Golf
12. Singing
13. Painting
14. Learning a software

 

The list can be endless. If you are learning something, and you give up you are missing a big opportunity to excel in something where you have talent. Among all learning strategies, not giving up is one of the most important one.

 

In fact, you may be surprised that if you pursue beyond a certain point, you will suddenly feel in control; your performance will improve exponentially, and you will be able to one day attain mastery.

Persistence will not only help you to learn faster, but it will also help all other learning strategies you may be using.