SELF IMPROVEMENT AND MOTIVATION

In today’s fast-paced world, chronic stress is common, but your mind and body can pay a high price. Learn to recognize overwhelming stress—and what you can do about it. What is stress? Stress is your body’s way of responding to any kind of demand or threat. When you sense danger—whether it’s real or imagined—the body’s defenses kick into high gear in a rapid, automatic process known as the “fight-or-flight” reaction or the “stress response.” The stress response is the body’s way of protecting you. When working properly, it helps you stay focused, energetic, and alert. In emergency situations, stress can save your life—giving you extra strength to defend yourself, for example, or spurring you to slam on the brakes to avoid a car accident. Stress can also help you rise to meet challenges. It’s what keeps you on your toes during a presentation at work, sharpens your concentration when you’re attempting the game-winning free throw, or drives you to study for an exam when you’d rath...

Too many managers avoid giving any kind of feedback , regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. If you work for a boss who doesn’t provide feedback, it’s easy to feel rudderless. It can be especially disorienting if you’re new in the role, new to the company, or a recent graduate new to the workforce. In the absence of specific guidance, is there any way to know what the average boss would want you to work on? While everyone will have different strengths and weaknesses they need to work on, when we examined our database of performance evaluation information for more than 7,000 individual contributors and 5,000 managers, we noticed a reliable pattern. There were five behaviors that managers most often associated with high performance: Delivering results. The strongest, most consistent correlations were skills that focused on achieving results. When individuals were able to achieve goals on schedule and did everything possible to get results, managers were impressed. Anot...

We are now in the era of do-it-yourself career development. Companies less frequently offer formal training  — a trend that has been around for years. This may be because employees change jobs so frequently ( job tenure now averages about four years) that firms don’t see the value in investing in people who are likely to leave. This is a sharp contrast with the investment that senior leaders used to make in employees. During my 11 years at PepsiCo, mostly during the 1990s, “personal development” was treated as a major company initiative. Unfortunately, organizations today are unknowingly leaving employees with skill gaps and blind spots that can derail careers and organizational effectiveness. And managers aren’t helping. Too worried about their own hides, most managers don’t have time or energy to focus on anyone else’s. In fact, Korn Ferry found that when managers rated themselves on 67 managerial skills, “developing others” came in dead last. Ideally, organization...

There’s an enormous amount of research suggesting that emotional intelligence (EQ) is critical to your performance at work.  TalentSmart  has tested the EQ of more than a million people and found that it explains 58% of success in all types of jobs. People with high EQs make $29,000 more annually than people with low EQs. Ninety percent of top performers have high EQs, and a single-point increase in your EQ adds $1,300 to your salary. I could go on and on. Suffice it to say,  emotional intelligence  is a powerful way to focus your energy in one direction with tremendous results. But there’s a catch. Emotional intelligence won’t do a thing for you if you aren’t genuine. A recent study from the Foster  School of Business  at the  University of Washington  found that people don’t accept demonstrations of emotional intelligence at face value. They’re too skeptical for that. They don’t just want to see signs of emotional intelligence. They want to know...

I don’t think anyone can dispute that now, more than ever, we need great leaders. People who can step up and show others the way. People who take charge, not in an overbearing way, but in a way that inspires others to follow. After all, you can’t be a leader unless others will follow you. Leaders emerge in all shapes and sizes and from all ranks of the organization and society. Leadership is not something just reserved for the top bastion of an organization. It exists everywhere, and right now we are witnessing some great leadership and also some really poor leadership. I’ll leave you to decide which is which! To help leaders navigate this situation, I have identified 7 characteristics they need to embody to be successful. These form the acronym  LEADERS . Leaderself Great leaders understand that they need to  look after themselves  first, before they can look after others. It’s a classic case of putting your oxygen mask on first before helping others. For man...

When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing. We saw others doing it spectacularly well. We were thrilled at the thought of reaching the top of the climbing wall; we had no idea how to get there. I’d imagine that a  social media marketing strategy  could feel the same way. If you’re starting from square one, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself. It’d help to have a plan. We’ve shared before about different parts of a social media strategy— the data and research  and personal experience behind  what works on social media . Now we’re pleased to put it all into a cohesive, step-by-step blueprin...