Should I Tweet or Should I……?

With job applications to complete which can take several hours, interviews to prepare for, telephone calls to recruiters to make and so much more when it comes to job hunting the temptation to a little procrastination can be as real as it is in the workplace. So how do we ensure that we avoid procrastination whether we are in a job or looking for a new role?

Let’s start by recognising that we are not alone! Procrastination is one of the most common ways people sabotage themselves and don’t get all all they want from life. By putting things off, they are not as efficient and productive, and can cause damage to their professional and personal lives.

Fortunately, there are several quick and easy ways to stop procrastinating and start moving forward with all your important goals.

  1. Make a list of what needs to be done – Then you can start tackling these tasks.
  2. Rank that list in order of priority – Put those with the closest deadline at the top of the list.
  3. Break large projects into little steps – In this way, we won’t feel overwhelmed and can create a pattern of slow but steady progress.
  4. Organise your workspace – A cluttered work area will be harder to be productive in. Organize your space with a place for everything, and everything in its place. In this way, you won’t waste valuable time hunting for things you need.
  5. De-clutter your computer – Your computer should also be well organized, like a filing cabinet, with folders and files all named something meaningful that will help you find them again. Don’t just dump everything into Documents or litter your desktop screen with everything that “you might just need.”
  6. Rearrange your room – If your desk is facing a window or something else that might be distracting, such as a TV, it might be time to move around the furniture so your room says “Work!” instead of “daydream” or “waste time”. If it is a multipurpose room, such as your office and also a guest room, group the furniture together by function. And don’t hang out on the bed with your laptop all the time, or you will be in danger of falling asleep.
  7. Keep a paper calendar – Carry a small calendar with you. It’s useful for writing down important dates and checking availability.
  8. Use time management techniques – Time management is the art and skill of making the most of the time you have by organizing it and using it efficiently. Start by seeing where your time is going each day. Track yourself on a spreadsheet in 15-minute increments. Write down what you do: Get up, go to sleep, break for lunch, have a meeting and so on. Do this for a week. Chances are you will find things that are eating up your time but have no real value.
  9. Avoid eating up time with email, Facebook and so on – Email, Facebook and other social sites can be handy for communicating and marketing, but they can also eat up a lot of time. Try to look at them no more than three times a day: morning, noon and night. You will be amazed at how productive this can make you.

If you struggle with procrastination, try some or all of these tips and see what a difference they can make to your life.

How Effective Is Your Online Personal Brand?

Have you given any thought to your Online Personal Brand? Whether you have been online for years or are only really getting into it of late, you need from time to time to review how you are using “online” to support and maintain your intentional personal brand and also broaden your reputation.

The tools offered online to communicate and network are incredibly powerful in terms of the opportunities they give to communicate your personal brand, strengths and areas of expertise.

If the area of online personal branding is new to you then the following will help you to get a head start.  If you have been online for some time then a litttle time spent reviewing how you are doing is always time well spent.

How To Build Your Online Personal Brand – Start with Google

In evaluating your online reputation, ego surfing or vanity surfing (going to Google or Yahoo, putting your name in quotes and seeing what turns up) will help you determine your existing  visibility and indeed your credibility. You might learn, for example, that something has been posted online about you that is less than flattering. Is your name the same as a convicted felon? Maybe that’s why clients aren’t calling you back or the job offers aren’t coming in!

On the other hand, you might find that your ego is a little bruised when you find that nothing shows up. You might even stop and wonder if you even exist! This  lack of results could be a result of not being focused on your online presence. The good news is that you can fix this!

First, prepare a Google profile by visiting Google Profiles. There, you will be prompted to post information about yourself, your career and your interests. This tool is completely free and tends to rank high in Google searches. A Google profile is similar to a LinkedIn profile where you control the content.

LinkedIn and Your Online Personal Brand

LinkedIn provides you with a tool to start building your online reputation by offering space for you to write about your professional background, including your specialties, experience, education and interests. Once you’ve populated a profile at LinkedIn with your photograph, summaries of your experience and education, you can start connecting with colleagues. Find people who you’ve worked with in the past, who you’ve met at networking events and who you work with currently. Send them invitations to connect and become part of your network online.

LinkedIn also provides an impressive extension to your professional networking efforts. On LinkedIn, you can join groups that bring like-minded professionals together to discuss important questions and issues within their areas of interest. These can be professional groups, alumni associations, interest groups, etc.

Facebook and Your Online Personal Brand

Imagine if you’re sharing something or building a relationship with somebody in your audience and they decide to share that with their audience. That circle of influence is growing and growing!

I use Facebook to bring my brand to life and to humanize myself to online audiences. If done well, Facebook offers a great way to build a personal reputation and credibility within your network of “friends.”

Facebook Groups

Facebook also has groups. Groups are similar to business pages but are intended more for special interests or clubs, such as an alumni association or Neighborhood Watch program. Each group has an administrator, and members can be selected or limited, just like a club in the real world.

Blogging and Your Online Personal Brand

I think blogs are fantastic, if done right(as the one you are on is – I hope!). If you want to attract and retain readers, it’s important to be clear and organized with your blog focus.

Just like the other social platforms we’ve discussed, blogging is a form of dialogue. Even though you publish the content, you want a conversation. You want people to comment on your posts and even to link to your blog in their blogs or websites.

Be sure to blog about things that are consistent with the positioning that you’re building. Comment on other people’s blogs. Start a conversation. Build a community around a topic.

Blog readers spend one to two minutes reading a post, so you want to make sure that your content is interesting and engaging to your audience. The ideal blog post is 250 to 750 words in length.

Twitter and Your Online Personal Brand

Unlike a blog, which is unlimited in content, Twitter gives you only 140 characters with which to express your point in posts called “tweets.” This can be tough! People who are interested in what you have to say can choose to follow you on Twitter. Your tweets are fed through all sorts of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) formats.

The tweets by all the people you follow are fed into a home page that opens when you log into Twitter, or into a Twitter application that you can set up to sort and filter your incoming Tweets, or into your mobile device.

One well tested strategy for Twitter is to connect with peers, clients, potential clients and a targeted online community while building your reputation. Allow some of your personality to come through on Twitter, as you should do on all social networking sites. People want to connect with real people. Being human, authentic and expressive online gives credibility to your personal brand.

YouTube and Your Online Personal Brand

The beauty of YouTube is the simplicity with which you can share all of this. Let’s say you’re in interior design, residential real estate or web design. You can easily produce some very quick, one- or two-minute videos on best practices or suggestions to help others. You don’t have to be a videographer or produce highly formatted edited content. A simple webcam or camcorder is enough to create a video of decent quality.

Effective Online Personal Branding

They say that for websites “content is king” when it comes to online personal branding then credibility is king. To gain visibility and recognition, you must walk the talk of the values you promote.

For instance, if you say you are about collaboration, then you must engage in dialogue with others, share resources and celebrate the success of others as well as your own. The online community is extremely focused on transparency, and they’ll expose an impostor in a very public way.

Your goal is to create a real, genuine and engaging online persona that will attract the attention of people who care about issues similar to yours. You cannot use the online space to create an alter ego and show up as someone you’re not. Stick to your personal brand plan and you won’t go wrong.

If you take the time to build your initial strategy and let it guide you through your online personal branding journey, the details will fall into place. Have fun and be yourself. I look forward to seeing you online!

Deciding Which Social Media Sites You Should Use

There’s an amazing array of social media sites out there isn’t there! They range from the “giants” like Facebook to small, niche-oriented sites you could hardly find if you didn’t know them. Whether you are an individual, a charity or a small business it’s almost impossible to create and effectively manage a profile on every site on which your target market might be found. Instead, what I would suggest you look at is choosing the most effective and most active social media networks for connecting with your customers.

Different Types of Social Media

Social media sites come in all shapes and sizes. The first step is to identify what kinds would work best to communicate your marketing messages. I have linked to some of the sites which I think are the most useful and where I haven’t provided a link and you think that it might meet your needs then they are easy to find! The main categories include:

General Sites – These are sites like Facebook and Google+ that are meant for people to hang out and connect with friends.

Microblogging – The most popular microblogging sites are Twitter and Tumblr. These sites allow you to make short posts in real-time.

Blogs – Blogs are a form of social media on which a business or individual can write posts and readers can comment. You can host your blog yourself as I do here or use a platform like Blogger or WordPress.

Video Sites – These are sites for sharing videos. The most popular is YouTube, but there are many others as well.

Coupon and Check-in Sites – Another important type of social media site is one where businesses allow users to check in to offline locations, write reviews, and get coupons. These include Groupon, Yelp, CityPages, and Foursquare.

Visually Oriented Social Media –These include image-oriented sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Flickr.

Music and Entertainment Sites – Some sites are excellent tools for bands and recording artists, such as MySpace and BandCamp. They’re specially designed for posting and sharing audio files.

Professional Networking Sites – Sites such as LinkedIn are primarily B2B sites for professional networking or recruiting.

Finally, there are niche-specific social media sites based around the common interests of a specific group.

Cultivating An Attitude of Gratitude

2017 is the first year that I can recall where I have started the year in the position of looking for a new role as a Learning & Development Professional. So as I am sure you can imagine I have been reflecting a lot over the days leading up to the New Year. I have taken time to consider those things in my life which I am grateful for because in that way I have been able to focus on the positive.

I wanted to share some thoughts on how we can each cultivate an attitude of gratitude.  There are a number of ways to cultivate this “attitude of gratitude” so that we can recognise and feel that we are living an abundant life even when times get tough.

Below are some of what I think are the best ways to practice gratitude regularly.

Counting Your Blessings

Each morning and each evening, think of three to five things you are grateful for that day. Even on the worst day, there are things to be grateful for. If you do this daily, eventually you’ll find that you notice more positives and less negatives in your life. Several of my friends on Twitter use the #hashtag #3GoodThings to capture those good things they have experienced each day in a public forum.

Keep a Gratitude Journal

List the things you are grateful for by writing them down at the start and end of each day. Or engage in undirected writing in which you think about all the things you are grateful for and the best things about your abundance.

A gratitude journal can be particularly helpful if you know you tend to be more of a pessimist than an optimist or lean towards negative self-talk. By regularly journaling about all the things you have to be grateful for, you can maintain a positive and peaceful mind and abundant mindset – even when things start to get a bit stressful.

Meditation

Meditating means to think. There are different forms of meditation – from Zen meditation, to contemplative meditation in which you choose to think about a particular topic. With Zen meditation, the goal is to empty or quieten the mind. This is a good starting point for then being able to think more deeply about important topics in your life, such as all the things you are grateful for.

Mindfulness meditation teaches you to focus on the here and now, so you can make the most of the present as it unfolds, moment by moment, and appreciate the abundance you are experiencing.

Practice Saying “Thank You” and “I Appreciate It”

Manners cost nothing, and the positivity of thanking others and telling them how much you appreciate them is always a good way to cultivate an attitude of gratitude.

Give Thanks and Pray

As I have written about elsewhere my personal faith is important to me and a source of strength and at time real challenge. However, no matter what your belief system, say thank you to any higher power you believe in for all of the abundance you have in your life. Wish the same for others. You will be amazed at the power of positive thinking.

6 Tips for Building Resilience to Stress

Stress is all around us in the modern world, and can really wear us down if we are not careful, leading to all sorts of personal and health issues. Whether it’s the stress that can come from having to find a new job or dealing with all that is involved in Christmas people find many different situations stressful. Building up your resilience to stress is one of the best way of coping with it, so that you bounce back more quickly from tough times rather than get swamped by them. Here are several ways you can build resilience to stress so you don’t burn out.

1. Put together a powerful support network

Studies have shown that those with the best support network are often the most resilient. They know their friends and family will help them in stressful times and are not afraid to ask for assistance for fear of seeming weak. They say what they need and will return the favor whenever the other person needs it.

2. Practice good self-care

Stress can have an extremely negative effect on both physical and mental health. Eating right, exercising, getting eight hours of sleep a night, and avoiding negative coping behaviors (such as smoking tobacco, using illicit drugs, or drinking alcohol) can all help them avoid burnout.

3. Learn from past experiences

Dealing with stress successfully often means dealing with stressful situations and learning from them, so the next time something similar happens you will be prepared. It sounds terrible to say it, but it is only through the illness and death of a loved one that a person will really learn how to cope with these types of situations.

Through getting support and overcoming these issues, you set a pattern for success. You don’t feel powerless – you are able to take action and produce the results you wish for.

4. Be flexible

A lot of stress comes from an “Oh, no!” attitude that makes you tense and unable to deal with the situation in a calm manner. Being flexible – that is, rolling with the changes through understanding that change is a natural part of life, can lower your stress response and make it easier to deal with issues in a calm, practical way. Stuff happens. Deal with it. Then move on to the next challenge.

5. Don’t sweat the small stuff

If you stress over every little thing, you will always be stressed. That being the case, learn to let go and not stress over things that in the long run will really make very little difference. If you get upset, think, “Will I remember this issue a week from now? A year from now?” If the answer is no, deal with it as best you can and move on.

6. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude

When we are under stress, it’s easy to focus on the negative and the present struggle we are facing. But if we take a moment to think about all we are grateful for, it can add a whole new appreciation for life. Thinking about the best things in your life you are grateful for can change your perspective and mood completely.

Stress nowadays is an inescapable part of life, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Work on building your resistance to stress and see what a difference it can make in your life.