Year-end Checkup for Your Personal Brand
The beginning of the calendar year is a natural time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished and what you’d rather change about yourself. Here are some questions to ask about your personal brand.
Building skills on the job
The beginning of the calendar year is a natural time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished and what you’d rather change about yourself. Here are some questions to ask about your personal brand.
Being tuned in to other people’s emotions – and taking steps to make them feel better about themselves – will help you become more likeable. Lowndes says that people will associate you – and the memory of you – with the emotion they experienced when they met you. If you make someone uncomfortable, she’ll avoid you. Make him feel warm and appreciated, and he’ll get a warm feeling whenever he thinks about you.
Leil Lowndes is a management consultant and speaker and author of How to Instantly Connect with Anyone: 96 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships. Her book helps you understand the basics of making other people feel comfortable and, well, good around you. Her theory is that if you make someone feel good about themselves, they will get a warm, Pavlovian feeling every time they see you. Conversely, if you make people uncomfortable, that sense of unease follows whenever they see you.
If you’re a big-picture, inspirational leader, you may rely heavily on your charisma and persuasive skills to win over skeptics. That’s fine, until you encounter a data-driven analytical type who cares more about whether you’ve done your homework than how fine your words are.
Personality conflicts are a fact of life in the office. Even if a team has the same goals, they will differ on how to achieve them. Understanding your own communication style and decision process is important if you want a successful team. Even more important than self awareness, though, is your ability to adapt to the other team members’ styles when communicating with them.
So, genius (or at least mastery) is achievable for all of us. That’s the good news – you don’t have to be born brilliant to become brilliant. That’s also the bad news – you’re only as good as you want to be.
@work as a guest blogger at Career Rocketeer… It’s not easy being the boss. Your manager’s job is to provide direction. Yours is to get the work done – and done right. But management can be a two way street, and whether or not you’re seen as a valuable asset depends in part on how … Continue reading How to Manage your Boss
Matthew Barrett, founder of Brain Trainers, was the speaker for our November 18 WorkSource Professional Network meeting. The primary reason people can’t remember facts, faces or names is that they can’t retrieve the information from their long term memory – what Barrett calls the “file cabinet.” Some information never gets from short-term memory – he calls it “the desktop” to long-term. Some information is filed, but may not be easily retrieved upon command. There are a couple of factors that can inhibit memory and recall.
Not only are employers starting to investigate their workers’ crazy stories, but they are also getting more prone to check out even believable excuses. Nearly 70 percent of surveyed employers said they asked for a doctor’s note, about half called the “sick” employee to check-in, and 18 percent had someone else make the phone call to catch the employee off guard.
Matthew Barrett, founder of Brain Trainers, is the speaker for our November 18 WorkSource Professional Network meeting. He says that there are five ways you can move information from your short-term “desktop” to your long-term “file cabinet.”