Archives for September 2010

September 27, 2010

Quitting a Job with Style

I’ll tell you one thing many people seriously consider after working with me in a communication coaching program: quitting their job. I usually couldn’t be happier about this, as I believe that quitting a job is a natural part of career progress, which we often postpone unnecessarily.

Most people tend to find quitting a job as a delicate subject. They see all sorts of risks involved and they wanna do it right.

I think it’s a challenge to give generally applicable advice for quitting a job, as the context can vary a lot: some people quite a job because they absolutely hate it and they run like the wind, other people quit a job even though they love it, because an even better opportunity arisen.

However, I can think of 3 people skills principles which apply in most cases when quitting a job. They focus not only on doing it right, but on doing it with style. Here they are:

1. Don’t say you’re quitting your job at first

Many people are quitting their job for only slightly improved conditions, such as a slightly bigger salary or slightly more important responsibilities.

Often, if your employer knows about these extra benefits you want to leave for and values you as an employee, they will make you a counter-offer which you might want to consider. I have many examples of this happening and the employee deciding to stay after all, with improved working conditions.

This is why I believe in these cases, it’s best to not tell your employer directly that you’re leaving. Instead, tell him at first that you’re considering leaving and mention the extra benefits which are motivating you to do this.

Then, mention that you would like to stay with them if they make you a good counter-offer. Only if they do not, you can decide and announce firmly that you’re quitting your job.

2. Phrase it in the positive

One manifestation of good people skills I find highly valuable is talking about improvements rather than about solving problems. This technique works especially well when announcing that you’re quitting a job.

Preferably, don’t say: “I don’t like this job and I want to get the hell out of here”. Instead, say “I’m interested in a job which is closer to my passion and I think I have the best chances of finding one somewhere else”.

The main point is to talk about the improvements you aim to achieve through another job, rather than the problems you aim to get away from. This gets the best possible reactions from others and allows you to leave an employer without senselessly breaking the relationship.

3. Throw a farewell party

I bet you didn’t expect this one, did you?

Many times, people will quit a job although they get along well with most of their colleagues. Their reasons for quitting have to do with something else. So it makes sense to say goodbye to your colleagues in a fun, memorable way which communicates how much you appreciate them.

I call this a P-A-R-T-Y! You don’t have to through a big party and invite all the company. A small office, house, pub or club party with your dearest colleagues will do.

By the way: when I see ‘colleagues’ I’m including here your manager, clients, and collaborators – anyone you respect and have worked well with. Believe it or not, a farewell party when quitting a job can be a very good business networking and relationship building tool.

I believe it does make sense to try ending a work relationship on a positive note and good people skills will help you achieve this. At the same time, I think the best mental frame to have is that quitting a job is not a big deal.

With this mind frame, you can make quitting a job a simple, constructive and even enjoyable experience. Who knows, you might even make a hobby out of it…

Image courtesy of Stuck in Customs

Filed Under: Career, Communication Skills, People Skills Tagged With: , , 12 Comments
September 22, 2010

How Badly Do You Really Want It?

Take a moment to ask a person about their dreams and they’ll tell you about a fulfilling career, a great relationship, or their own island in the Pacific Ocean.

Take a couple more moments, as I often do in coaching, to ask them what they’re planning to do in order to make their dreams come true, and you’ll often hear the most unrealistic fairytales.

In my experience, most people are simply not willing to do the things which will realistically make them achieve their big dreams, things which happen to also be pretty hard. Thus, they automatically reject the most effective alternatives, they’re stuck with bad alternatives and they eventually abandon their dreams.

Real Stories

Here are three real examples, of people I’ve interacted with in the past few months:

  1. A person who wants to become a top professional in a Fortune 500 company, but is not willing to leave the small town they live in. Why? Because all their friends and relatives are there.
  2. A person who hates their job and wants to go into a new professional field, but is not willing to take the initial salary cut. Why? Because they would have to sell their fast car and take the subway for a while.
  3. A person who wants to have a successful business, but is not willing to work for 2 or 3 years at developing this business besides their regular job, until it becomes sustainable. Why? Too much work.

In all these examples, the path exists. The only problem is that the person is not willing to take the path. They don’t want to make the necessary compromises.

Quitting In the Face Of a Challenge

Now I’m not saying that all compromises are good. Sometimes, the effort to get to a certain place in your life is just not worth it by comparison with the benefits. However, this is not the case I’m talking about.

The real issue in my view is that many people aren’t willing to make even strategic compromises, which in the end would be worth it: the short-term compromise for the much bigger long-term benefits.

In my area of people skills, I see countless examples of people who aren’t willing to accept a challenge and put in the work to improve key people skills, even though they know how much it would enrich their lives. They stop at the level of: “Yeah, I know: I should probably work on this.” And they pay the price.

Reality Check

Let’s turn the discussion towards you. I invite you to look at your life, your career and your relationships, and ask yourself four magic questions:

  1. What are my biggest, boldest dreams in these areas?
  2. What are realistically, the things I need to do in order to achieve these dreams?
  3. Which of these things have I really accepted and decided to do?
  4. Which of these things am I really doing?

If you’re like 98% of people, you’ll find out that your deeds aren’t exactly aligned with your dreams. There is a gap between them which if you don’t face, can become as big as the Grand Canyon.

You may try to find shortcuts and creative solutions to achieve your goals with little effort or struggle. If your goals are high, chances are that you will not find them or they won’t work.

The roads to great places tend to have quite the bumps at some points. The best thing you can do is to accept the bumps in the road and go through them.

In a way, you could say that making those hard, initial compromises to get what will truly enrich your life is the easy way. I say this because if you look at things in perspective, you end up living a much more meaningful and joyful life.

However, the meaningful joyful life does imply an initial level of work, perseverance and sacrifice which only few people are willing to go through. But if you want something big and you want it badly enough, it makes sense to go beyond what most people are willing to do.

If you decide that you simply don’t want if badly enough, no problem. Just make sure that when you’re an old person and you tell stories to your grandchildren about your life, you don’t say that you could have been a great person but you didn’t have the opportunity. It was right there in your face!

Image courtesy of jurvetson

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Success Tagged With: , , , 23 Comments
September 19, 2010

Conversation Starters Project

Cool people,

A few days ago, I’ve launched a niche website which I encourage you to check out. It’s called Conversation Starters and it’s about (you’ve guessed it) conversation starters (I love it when the right domain is available).

This site aims to provide a quality answer to a frequent question: “How the hell do I start a conversation?” There are now only a few articles on it, but in the next few weeks it’s gonna fill with content.

The really good news, in my view, is that Conversation Starters will be more than a place to find cheesy lines. I take communication and people skills very seriously. This site will be a source for smart, practical conversation starters, as well as principles and techniques to understand and apply them effectively.

On a funnier note, it’s highly entertaining for me to write on a potentially corny subject and try to provide real value to readers, while maintaining a relaxed approach of the subject.

So, if you’re interested in improving your people skills in the area of initiating conversations, head on over to www.conversation-starters.com.

I’m looking forward to your feedback, plus, any good conversation starters you would like to share.

Image courtesy of CarbonNYC

Filed Under: News, People Skills Tagged With: , , 4 Comments
September 13, 2010

Dealing with Envious People

Reach a high enough level of success, skill or happiness, and you find out there are a lot of little green monsters around you, many of which you used to call friends, colleagues, partners or collaborators.

Since envy is a common and tricky interpersonal occurrence, I believe that dealing with envious people effectively is one of the important people skills to master. The primary thing to be acquainted with is not technique, but the fundamental philosophy of handling envious people. This is what I’ll focus this article on.

Reality Check

Before you think about dealing with envious people, answer this question: Are they really envious of you? You see, one thing I’ve noticed coaching people to improve their people skills is that in a many cases, envy is a false diagnostic.

What’s really going on is that a person has a better image of their skills or success than it’s warranted, so they act all arrogant and they expect special treatment. When this special treatment does not happen, the person wrongfully concludes that people are envious of them.

Here’s an example: a recruiter who believes they are the best recruiter in the company and should get the most important recruitment projects. However, their manager accurately believes that this person is not the best recruiter and gives them regular recruitment projects. So, the recruiter decides that their manager is just envious.

This is why it’s good to open your eyes really wide, notice what’s really going on and then decide if it’s a case of people green with envy or rather you being a self-righteous pain in the ass.

Putting Envious People in One of Two Boxes

If you decide that you’re dealing with real envy, the next thing I recommend is to think about those people who are envious of you and their real power to have a practical negative impact over you. Based on this, put them into one of two boxes:

  1. The Harmless Box. These are the people who besides making some bad jokes and not liking you very much don’t have the power or the guts to actually do something which can harm you.
  2. The Potential Threat Box. These are the people who do have enough power and nerve to potentially harm an aspect of your life, such as a work colleague who is very well trusted by all the top management in the company.

Ignore, Ignore, Ignore

The people in the first box are the people you just want to ignore. Let their jokes and passive-aggressive comments be like spears passing through water. There is no real harm they can do and often, if they see their comments have no effect on you, they eventually back off and continue hating you in silence.

By defending yourself in front of them or becoming passive-aggressive yourself, you are giving these people more importance than they deserve. Many of them are hopping this will happen, because they derive power not from real results, but from manipulative, power games.

Address Them Head On

The people in the second box, they are a different scenario. Since they can actually sabotage your career, relationships or life, you want to deal with them as soon as you notice comments or behaviors that suggest envy.

The first approach I recommend is talking to them. Point their conduct, express your honest opinions in a tactful way and seek to get their perspective on things. Yes, if your communication style is good enough, this does work and you can get the other person to back down.

If this approach fails, it’s time to put into play one of my favorite people skills: cutting this person’s power over you. This means you change your environment and your social dynamics so the envious person no longer has power to affect you.

One person I know who had an envious manager did so by becoming a good friend with and earning the trust of their manager’s manager. Another person with an envious manager did so by quitting their job and finding another one. Alternatives do exist; the essence is to act on them.

Envious people can be a bother, but they don’t have to. Know how to deal with them wisely, have the confidence and the people skills to do so, and they become insignificant; which is how I think envious people deserve to be.

Image courtesy of Darwin Bell

Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills, Relationships Tagged With: , , 42 Comments
September 8, 2010

How to Meet New People and Make New Friends

I remember many years ago, a woman told me how she is often bored because she doesn’t have a lot of friends. She was living in a city with over 3.000.000 people. I was shocked. I was wondering: “How can you live surrounded by so many people and not have enough friends to spend some quality time with?”

Since then, this scene has repeated itself many times, with many other persons. After a while, I realized how common this phenomenon was and it no longer shocked me.

I began thinking how I could assist others to meet new people and make new friends; thus my current profession plus a marginal obsession for social dynamics and improving people skills.

The Loneliness Paradox

Most of us walk on the streets every day passing by hundreds of other people. And yet many of us lack a good social circle, both in terms of quality and quantity.

It’s obviously not a problem of options. As a person who at one point consciously increased their sociability factor, I can tell you that there are not only a lot of people, but also many cool people out there, eager to meet new people and make new friends. It is a problem of confidence, strategy, people skills, or any combination of the three.

The good news is that you can develop any of these and get the kind of social life you want. In this article I will give you the fundamental points to developing your social circle and enriching your social life.

Meeting New People

One great way to meet new people is, in my view, taking on social activities. These activities can include sports, classes, hobbies, volunteer work etc. There are dozens of examples of specific social activities, which is exactly why I think it’s pointless for me to give you a few.

The point is to use social activities to get in environments where there are other people and by the nature of the activity you interact with them. At the same time, you want to get involved in activities which you believe you might enjoy; not just any social activity.

The other great way to meet new people that I know is getting your current friends to introduce you to some of their other friends. Of course, this doesn’t apply if your current friends are in a faraway town or if they don’t have any other friends, but it does apply in any other scenario.

I often tell my friends to give me a call whenever they’re going out with a group of cool people or to a fun party. I’ve repeated this to a few of them so many times that now they are in the habit of thinking about me whenever they go out. It helps if at one point, you can return your friends the favor, but in my experience, it’s not a must.

Making New Friends

Keep in mind that interacting with a new person does not automatically make that person a friend. Friendships happen when two people feel connected in some way. They discover they have things in common, they like each other or they got used with being part of each other’s lives.

Once you’ve met new people, you will need to keep the ball rolling in order to develop friendships. Two things come to mind on how to do this.

The first thing is to be very sociable. When interacting with somebody: talk about yourself and open up, ask the other person questions, listen actively, make jokes and focus on positive topics. Apparently simple actions like these and mixing them the right way are a reflection of good skills with people and the very fabric of making friends.

The second thing is to take the initiative and ask people out. If you interact with a person and you’re getting along well, that’s more than a good reason to initiate future interactions.

So if for example, you meet a person in your photography class you enjoy interacting with them, give them a call sometimes and ask them to join you for coffee, or something similar. As the interactions get rolling, if you get along even better, a friendship develops.

On paper/ your monitor, it may appear very easy to meet new people and make new friends. The trick is to skillfully apply ideas like the ones above. And the emphasis is not initially on the word ‘skillfully’, but on the word ‘apply’. Most people I know with poor social lives essentially need to get off their asses more.

One of the reasons I teach people skills is because I have seen and I have experienced for myself how fulfilling a rich social life can be. We live now in a world with more social opportunities than ever. I’m convinced it’s a worthwhile task to make good use of them.

Image courtesy of MorBCN

Filed Under: Lifestyle, People Skills, Relationships Tagged With: , , , , 10 Comments
September 5, 2010

When It Comes To Life Success, It’s All About Crafty Confidence – 5 Unorthodox Tips to Improve Yours

This is a guest post by Jonny Gibaud, co-founder of Emergency Food Storage. Jonny writes for the love of helping people, inspiring people and Katie Holmes. For articles on Life Design, Business and Sexy Money head over to his blog or check out his personal BrandBase.

Confidence Is The Winner

Confidence, more than ability, is usually what separates the winners from the losers and so what better trait to focus on for improving your confidence.

Some people are innately very confident and I am sure we all secretly harbor some resentment towards them because of it but even if confidence does not come easily to you, it can be improved. The 5 Unorthodox confidence boosting techniques we are going to focus on today are:

1. Wear Outrageous Underwear
2. Make Statements – Limit Explanation
3. Learn To Love Silence
4. Dress Dapper
5. Finish Well

1. Wear Outrageous Underwear

Sometimes the only thing you need to do to put your fears to rest is to have a secret that you know and no one else does. Imagining people in their underwear is yesterday’s news, wearing your own outrageous pair of skinnies under your clothes in the new future.

Having this little secret that you and only you in the room know will help you feel more relaxed and settled.

Personally, whenever giving a presentation or networking I like to wear a pair of silk black boxer shorts with bright red hearts on. (Yeah, too much information I know) but it is this little outrageous act that relaxes me and allows me to be at my most confident. Try it and see for yourself.

2. Make Statements – Limit Explanation

Confidence is all about perception and the quickest way to destroy that perception is to overly explain your job, idea, background, latest travels etc. Try to limit the amount of explaining you do unless specifically asked to.

Simply making a one sentence statement is incredibly powerful because it comes across that what you just said does not need explanation or proof.

“I’m a Personal Branding consultant who works with my clients to define and project a powerful Personal Brand both online and offline” is far more powerful then “I’m a Personal Branding consultant who works with my clients to define and project a powerful Personal Brand both online and offline. You need a personal brand because…..and I do this…and this for you…with this on the side”

3. Learn To Love Silence

Silence is your friend, my friend.

Most people hate silences and will do anything to avoid them, and it is for this reason that learning to love them can be so powerful.

Whether the silence falls within a natural lull in conversation or when contemplating an idea, people will normally try to jump in and fill it with repeated words, fill words or just plain nonsense. Anything but the silence.

If you can learn to enjoy the silences, not try to fill them and use the time to actually think (as opposed to having shifty, uncomfortable eyes) then the world is yours. People admire this trait and subconsciously attach a huge amount of self confidence to your character.

4. Dress Dapper

We all make snap decisions, we shouldn’t but we do. If you’re not looking your best, you will never feel and act your best.

Remember how confident you felt in a Tux or a beautiful dress. (Tux for boys, dress for girls. Behave people.) Clothes make a difference and nothing saps your confidence like turning up underdressed and not looking your best.

Take the time to make sure you look dapper and let your confidence expand from there. Your look is the foundation of your confidence.

5. Finish Well

It’s all in the finish people. Fortunately you can make a hash of almost everything but if you finish well, that has the major impact on what the audience takes away.

Focus on always finishing speeches, conversations and network events with a powerful and confident close. Practice and perfect it.

With a powerful close that will leave a great impression you can be safe in the knowledge than no matter how badly things go, people will tend to remember at least a confident close. This knowledge will also help you relax and in turn act more confident. It’s a great fulfilling circle of awesomeness.

Get Confident

So there you have it. Five very simple and effective techniques for improving your confidence. Go out and give them a try, I am sure you won’t be disappointed. Also, as a shameless plug for my new upcoming book keep and eye out for the launch of CHOOSE: Master of Money Or Slave To It.

Rock on all.

Image courtesy of pasotraspaso

Filed Under: Attitude, People Skills Tagged With: , , , , , , , 18 Comments