You have a dream, a vision of who you are, who you want to be and what you want to accomplish in your life, but it’s still not clearly in focus. It’s foggy like something is missing. You’ve tried to put your finger on it, but it’s elusive…it’s like you’re ‘lacking’ something…
Here are some things that hold us back from realizing those dreams and our full potential:
I Don’t Have Enough Time
I Can’t Afford It
I Lack Experience or Skills
I Need to Think It Over
What Will Others Think
I’m Not Good Enough
Life is Too Complicated Right Now
Lack of a Clear Purpose
I’m Too Old
Lack of Meaning in my Life
Lack of Confidence
Lack of Self-esteem
I Don’t Belong
Lack of Connections
Lack of Peace
I’m Overwhelmed
I’m Stressed Out
The list is lengthy, but they are just excuses to keep you in your comfort zone. Our “lizard” brains are trying to keep us in our ‘safe zone’ – a natural human instinct that has been with us from day one. The challenge is to get out of your comfort zone and become comfortable at being uncomfortable.
This is one of the greatest advantages of having a personal coach. Someone in your ‘corner’, not to give you advice but someone that “hears” you, understands your desires and aspirations, and guides you to where you want to go. A coach is non-judgmental and is there to shine a light on what is possible – opening a pathway to your desires and freedom.
A coach will hold you accountable for your word and commitments, something that is very difficult and takes a great deal of discipline to do on our own.
The journey to becoming your true self begins with a single step. What step will you take today towards being authentically YOU?
Tip of the Day: To become the person you were meant to be, start by identifying your core values. What do you stand for? Reflect on this and let it guide your decisions today!
Get a Free Consultation!
There is no charge to talk about how we can work together. If it works and we can help each other, it will happen. It’s your life – you are the Hero of it! You are writing the next great chapter of your life. If you desire to authenticate yourself and your goals and you would like me as your coach/mentor, I encourage you to contact me at CoachDeanKloter.com today.
Remove Your Limiting Beliefs & Unlock Your Natural Abilities
14 things I’ve learned about How to Reinvent Yourself
1. You can.
2. You should reinvent yourself when a new passion overtakes your heart and imagination.
3. You must focus on WHAT COULD GO RIGHT, and not on what could go wrong, OR you’ll never reinvent yourself.
4. Don’t focus on how much money you’ll make. Focus on what you need to do to become excellent… The ways to make money will become clear. There are always ways to monetize what you’re passionately committed to.
5. NEVER listen to those who don’t believe in you reinventing yourself. They are stuck seeing the current you. They lack the internal vision you have. And they are afraid of reinventing themselves.
6. WILDLY IMPORTANT: To BE a NEW you, you first have to be able to SEE a NEW you. You must spend time visualizing the new you. It’s not easy, but you can learn to do it.
7. Surround yourself with whoever is in your corner cheering you on. You need supporters and believers.
8. Get a COACH or MENTOR! Don’t go it alone! Don’t. It will kill your dream.
9. Be prepared for failure. Reinvention comes with mistakes. No big deal. Everyone you look up to failed their way there. You can learn to be resilient.
10. Work on your reinvention every day, five days a week. (Yes, take two days off – you need the balance). But work on it with tremendous consistency. This creates the all-magical momentum! Momentum is everything.
11. Keep growing and keep going. Right through the hardships, the walls, the stuck points, the dismal days, the challenging weeks. You’ll breakthrough. It’s inevitable.
12. Be the most patient and faithful and optimistic person in every room, always.
13. Often visualize your reinvention FULLY GLORIOUSLY realized in a way that makes you FEEL the exciting and wonderful things you’ll feel when you accomplish your reinvention. The Universe co-creates with you by turning your feelings into your realities.
14. LOVE IT ALL. Do your utmost to embrace every part of your reinvention, the good days, the bad days, the hard days – it’s the journey. Love the journey like you’re writing a great inspirational story full of ups and downs, thrills and chills – because you are writing a great story when you dare to reinvent yourself. You’re writing the next great chapter of your life. If you desire to reinvent yourself and write the next great chapter of your life, and you would like me as your mentor, I encourage you to contact me at CoachDeanKloter.com today.
The image above is a post I created on Instagram that shook my Soul to its core! It was a wakeup call to me that screamed “Well, Did You?” Of course, my answer was, not! At least not to my personal satisfaction. Sure, I’ve lived and enjoyed a wonderful life and have experienced love at its fullest. Have I made a difference? Probably at some level since some have told me their lives are better having known me.
Here’s the thing…ask yourself a couple additional questions like,
“What’s the most important thing in my life?”
“Who AM I, really?”
“What am I capable of?”
“Why am I here?”
“What does it mean to me, to ‘Live’, ‘Love’, and ‘make a difference’?”
These are the questions I had to answer first in order to say yes to the 3 questions.
Of course, we all have different answers to all these questions which is why each one of us will be traversing this same path at some point in our lives. Everyone wants to succeed in life. Every person on Earth is trying to answer these questions right now…including the person that is sitting in your chair right now!
For me, it was an inner voice that said “hold the phone here buddy…you need to spend some time now – today on this subject! The longer you put it off, the more you’ll miss out on an extraordinary life! You’d better get busy Living. The downside will be you getting busy dying and that shouldn’t even be on the table! Let’s go!”
I didn’t need to hear any more. The decision was made…there will be no more excuses like it’s too late, I’m not good enough, it’s too hard, I don’t know what to do…STOP! GET OVER YOURSELF! It’s time for you to make a change!
The two most powerful forces on Earth are Time and Change. Why? They affect every human on the planet whether you are 9 or 99 years old, these 2 components affect you. If you have no money, if you have too much money, it doesn’t matter.
Change – it creates 4 types of dimensions:
Change that happens to us
Change that happens around us
Change that happens within us
Change (most important) we make happen.
Which one will rule your life?
When you answer the five “wicked hard” life questions, you will know your purpose and when you know your purpose you will never be fearful again…fear, doubt, worry, guilt, and shame will no longer exist as real enemies in your life. You will no longer fear losing something. You will no longer fear death! You will stop toggling back and forth between the two mindsets – Fear and Love – the former is a ‘fixed’ mindset attached to the lower levels of being – the ‘home’ of fear and anxiety; the latter is a ‘growth’ mindset residing in the Spiritual realm – the ‘home’ of Love, Peace, and Joy.
Sound Pollyannish? Maybe so to you at the moment, but if you give ‘it’ a chance, you will see that it’s really all part of Nature’s plan. All Life is a cycle of growth and deterioration. A building up and a tearing down. You are either growing or deteriorating – Living or Dying – and the good news is that it’s your choice how much time you will spend in each realm!
A second (and greatest) benefit to answering these questions carefully is FREEDOM and LIBERTY. Answering these questions will lead you to the TRUTH – YOUR TRUTH…and the TRUTH will set you FREE! These were the words of the Master, Jesus as he spoke “If you abide in my word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:31-32. His teachings were solely meant to free you of the bonds and struggles that you and you alone have placed upon yourself over a lifetime of choices and consequences between living in the lower, physical realm of fear and anxiety and the Spiritual realm of Love, joy, beauty, freedom, and peace.
When you finally decide to live through your Spiritual ‘side’ of life, walking by faith vs. your own feeble and limited understanding, you will become conscious of the TRUTH and once grasped, Freedom and Liberty will follow. It’s a Promise from Nature; A Promise from the Universe; A Promise from God. A Promise from your Source. You decide what you call your Source.
A while back I read a book by Gregg Braden entitled “Deep Truth” where he posed some great questions that go right to the core of our being: “How can we know what choices to make until we answer the single question that lies at the heart of each and every choice: Precisely who are we?” Without answering this fundamental question, making life-altering decisions is like trying to enter a house without knowing where the door is. Sure, it’s possible to break through a window or knock down a wall but we’d damage the home in the process and maybe this is the perfect metaphor for the quandary we find ourselves in.
But there was a single question at the core of Life that set me on course of seeking the Truth: “Do you believe that there is one source for everything that happens in the world, or do you believe that there are two opposite and opposing forces – good and evil – one that “likes” you and one that doesn’t?”
Answering this question will shed light on your own personal Truth. One will set you free and the other will keep you bound in your own shackles.
In conclusion, the best ‘advice’ I ever pursued regarding seeking the Truth was simply – But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you – Matt 6:33. No one can teach you or tell you the Truth. You can’t get it from a book (you can read about it, but that’s only intellectual). It will not be unveiled to you until YOU seek it on your own, fervently and with true sincerity from your heart, in your own way. If that’s your only charge in life, I encourage you to stop/drop everything you are doing and find your personal Truth today – putting it off will only spawn regrets.
I used to wonder if my Dad’s old truck had a soul.
It certainly had character, with its dents, scuffs, and temperamental stick shift. Who knows what stories and exploits lay behind the truck’s dilapidated exterior.
Dad was no longer a spring chicken when he bought the old truck. He used to struggle at times with the stick shift, and repairs were frequent.
But then, Dad was drawn to old things like fountain pens, hardcover books, and the nostalgic design and feel of early model vehicles. Perhaps the truck’s high mileage and gently worn exterior reminded Dad of himself? Older, showing some wear, but still full of dreams.
“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”-John Barrymore
When Dad passed away we sold the old truck to a handyman who used to work on our house. “I love these old trucks,” the handyman said before driving off to probably the last chapters in that truck’s life story.
If trucks and cars are like people, I’ll bet they’re happiest when they’re useful. But what happens when they retire?
Do trucks and cars still matter then?
The importance of having fun
There’s an old mining town along Hwy 95 in Nevada known as Goldfield. In this town with a population of only a few hundred sits a surreal junkyard/art installation named “The International Car Forest of the Last Church.”
The installation contains a spread-out collection of old cars, limos, delivery trucks, and even a school bus. Many of these vehicles are buried nose first, with their back ends protruding upwards, out of the dirt like ostriches.
“Never, ever underestimate the importance of having fun.”-Randy Pausch
The entire installation is strange, colorful, memorable, and fun. There was even a music video filmed on the site.
The installation was the brainchild of Goldfield local Mark Rippie, who wanted to out-do similar type installations like Texas’ Cadillac Ranch and Nebraska’s Carhenge. Rippie got help from artists Chad Sorg and Zak Sargent. The project was 9-years in the making.
It’s safe to say that all of the vehicles resting at The International Car Forest of the Last Church are retired. They no longer matter, at least the way they used to.
But weirdly, they look like they’re having fun. As if they’re no longer taking themselves too seriously.
If cars and trucks that no longer matter can still have fun, what about us?
We need to master irrelevancy
Growing up, you tend to focus on yourself and your goals. You often have parents, family members, and friends cheering you on.
You pursue a career, promotions, relationships, and the many milestones of life (ie: marriage, first house, children, career success, etc). Others depend on you, there’s purpose in your life, and you know you matter.
But sooner or later, just like old cars in a junkyard, you will matter less. Maybe your kids will grow up and move away, or you’ll lose your job and suddenly be unemployed.
You’ll retire and notice fewer email and phone messages. Work colleagues carry on without you since you’re out of the game now.
Where once you felt engaged and important, sooner or later you end up feeling forgotten and irrelevant.
The question is: Will you be Ok with mattering less?
In an article for Harvard Business Review, writer Peter Bregman wrote:
“As we get older, we need to master the exact opposite of what we’ve spent a lifetime pursuing. We need to master irrelevancy. This is not only a retirement issue. Many of us are unhealthily-and ultimately unhappily-tied to mattering. It’s leaving us overwhelmed and over-busy, responding to every request, ring and ping with the urgency of a fireman responding to a six-alarm fire. Are we really that necessary?”
This notion of mattering less doesn’t just apply to older adults and retirees. Think about all the people desperately trying to be liked on social media.
The reality is that everyone has an ego, whether young or old. We all want to matter and be recognized by our peers. The problem is that our self-worth becomes dependent on the opinions of others.
So how do we stop feeling irrelevant and learn to embrace life? How do we learn to matter less and smile more?
Focus on the present and celebrate your freedom
Our egos are always worrying about the past or the future at the expense of the present. Also, worrying about what others think hijacks our freedom. We’re more hesitant to do what we want to.
You can do what you want
Irrelevancy brings a kind of freedom.
Consider the old limo in The International Car Forest of the Last Church. It’s covered with graffiti now, resting atop an aging delivery truck.
It looks ridiculous, but do you think it cares? Heck no. It’s having fun. It’s retired and has the freedom to look however it wants to.
When we stop worrying about how much we matter, we have the freedom to do what we want.
As Peter Bregman notes:
“When your purpose shifts like this, you can do what you want. You can take risks. You can be courageous. You can share ideas that may be unpopular. You can live in a way that feels true and authentic. In other words, when you stop worrying about the impact of what you do, you can be a fuller version of who you are.
Enjoying the freedom that comes with being irrelevant can help us avoid depression and enjoy life after retirement, even for people who have spent their careers being defined by their jobs.”
Whether you’re feeling irrelevant from a recent retirement, job loss, relationship change, or another big life event, don’t despair. Stop worrying about how much you matter, and take advantage of your new freedom.
Here are a few suggestions to overcome feeling irrelevant:
Take pleasure in the activity versus the outcome. Don’t worry about how good your artwork is, or how many likes you might get on social media. Learn to enjoy the present moment and the joy of what you are doing.
Listen to others more, and talk less about yourself. People love to talk about themselves. Even when they appear to be listening to you, they’re often formulating their next thought.
Train yourself to listen more. Ask questions. Resist the temptation to make it about you. This will teach you to let go of your ego and how much you matter. Also, others will think you’re the best conversationalist when actually it’s just that you listen well.
Talk to a stranger for the pleasure of it. Random conversations with people we don’t know can be very fulfilling. We learn new perspectives, and reports indicate random conversations are good for our health and well-being.
Practice mindfulness or meditation. Carthusian monks spend most of their day alone, praying and thinking in individual cells. Their food is delivered through a small locking window.
Carthusian monks live the most austere and cloistered lives of all Christian monks. They shun the Internet and are unknown to the rest of the world, yet they are some of the most peaceful and contented men you’ll ever meet.
Carthusians don’t spend their days worrying about how much they matter. Through prayer, mindfulness, and deep solitude, they are free in ways that many of us can only dream of.
The good news is that you don’t have to become a monk to practice mindfulness and meditation, and doing so can free you from feelings of irrelevancy.
Forever is composed of nows
The International Car Forest of the Last Church shows us that old vehicles may not be useful or matter the way they once did, but they can have a lot of fun in retirement. Instead of driving people around, now they’re entertaining people as an art installation.
How about you? Are you ready to stop feeling irrelevant and embrace the freedom that comes from living in the moment? Stop worrying about mattering, and spend more time living.
“Forever is composed of nows.”-Emily Dickinson
I don’t know where my Dad’s old truck is today. Maybe it’s still in service, or maybe it has flowers growing out of its engine block.
The latter doesn’t sound so bad. There’s peace in the garden, where the sun and rain bring growth, and the flowers quiver in the breeze, indifferent to what the world thinks of them.
On the other side of ego lies the Truth. When the ego succumbs and dies, a new being is born, resurrected from the ashes, all by the Grace of God.
It is an individual experience, one that only you can have and own. Each person’s experience is different, but the end result is the same.
No one can ‘do’ this for you because no one has had the same experiences as you. You must recognize the need, have a burning desire to go the distance, take the first step, and keep going. Focus!!!
Once a person understands the reason why something is the way it is or isn’t, they gain great clarity! That clarity gives you Focus on what you want and what you don’t want.
As human beings we are designed to operate at the pinnacle of greatness, but we’ve been conditioned to operate from mediocrity. This is why we feel that something is just not quite right with our lives. Deep down inherently we ‘know’ that we are supposed to be performing, achieving; that we should be doing something different, something more than what we are currently doing.
How often we feel that we should be operating at a much higher level, and it doesn’t feel right, but we just don’t know what to do or what it is we want to move forward with. If you look at causation, you can see that we’ve been conditioned to operate in a world of mediocrity – a blasé environment.
Why is that? The environment of our society, our education system, business and social structures and cultures have been, perhaps even unintentionally, designed to hold us back into mediocrity.
1) Most people have no idea what a picture of greatness looks like. We need some kind of reference as to what greatness looks like, say in human form and what the possibilities are for another to achieve that same greatness.
2) Creating greatness is an individual preference but collaboration with those that have experienced it is the key to the exponential growth of human achievement going forward. Individual preference is tantamount – because each of us needs to be our own person and not an imitation of someone else. Collaboration based on encouraging an individual to reach their potential within the individual’s current conscious abilities, i.e. what’s possible for them in this moment and grow from there.
3) Develop a PATH
4) Develop confidence for sustainable action
5) Course correction w/mentors
6) Teach it to others
The benefits of collaboration are many, but the most effective is that each person has a piece of the puzzle that the other does not have so as collaboration evolves, the puzzle comes together into the bigger picture that all may see. Putting all the pieces together leads to fulfillment for all.
So many people today are living unfulfilled lives! Collaboration provides the leverage we need to grow.
7) “Reprogram” who you are to who you want to become. Reprogramming your beliefs from the understanding of: A love for mankind, a desire to add value and a strong belief in the betterment of one another.
Now that you know who you are, where do you want to go and how are you going to get there?
Commitment, desire, stick with it without ever giving up!
CREATE YOUR PATH –
What’s the best way to learn something? Learning is voluntary. We learn what we want to learn, what interests us.
How do you want to be remembered?
Be the man or woman that added value and increase to everyone he or she met or knew… Because I was in your life, you benefited from it. By listening, believing in, acknowledging them that their life is relevant, comforting, supporting, teaching, and helping others to succeed…
Fresh college graduates face the daunting task of launching their professional careers at the time of the new normal. The pandemic has affected economies around the world and the United States was not spared.
A 6.5% growth in the second quarter of 2021 raised hopes that the U.S. is on track for a post-pandemic economic recovery. Slowly but surely, businesses will be rising from the hardships caused by intermittent lockdowns all over the world.
But just when HR departments and recruiters were anticipating busier days ahead as thousands of job openings hit the market, businesses were hit with another problem.
The New Reality At The Time Of The New Normal
More American workers are quitting their jobs at a time when the economy is on a cusp of a boom. The number of resignations are hitting record highs – at levels unseen the past 20 years.
Apparently, as the pandemic triggered an emergency shift toward work-from-home arrangements, many people realized they prefer to dedicate more time with family and an office job won’t cut it.
As the saying goes, when one door closes, another one opens. In this case, there are an estimated 9.3 million open doors for fresh college graduates to walk through.
What Skills Are Recruiters Looking For In Fresh College Graduates?
Despite the demand for new talent to make up for the resignations, getting hired is never automatic for fresh college graduates. Recruiters still want to find the best candidates to fill in key positions in the company.
You still need to qualify for the job by having the skills recruiters are looking for in fresh college graduates.
1. Technology Savvy
Before the pandemic, we were already headed toward a technology-intensive global economy.
Concepts such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Virtual Reality (VR), the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Augmented Reality (AR) were increasingly discussed and gradually implemented in many businesses.
Digital technology will continue to evolve and introduce new innovations designed to improve efficiency and productivity as integrating remote workforces remain the norm in the age of the new normal.
When the world went on lockdown mode, many businesses were scampering to familiarize themselves with telecommuting and teleconferencing tools such as ZOOM, WebEx, MS Teams, and Google Meet.
Likewise, companies are investing in developing technology that’s proprietary to the business. These are software programs, hardware, and networking systems that are designed specifically to run the processes of the company.
Recruiters will be looking for fresh college graduates who are proficient in technology. They must be comfortable managing work through the use of software programs and only a slight learning curve to deal with.
2. Leadership
Leadership used to be a skill that was identified only with those in the mid-management level position to the top officers in the company. Today, recruiters are constantly on the lookout for talent with the potential to become potential leaders within the organization.
In business, success is never guaranteed. There are always hindrances or obstacles toward accomplishing business goals. A company wants to hire people who aren’t afraid of facing these obstacles. They view problems as challenges that need to be overcome.
Leaders are people who aren’t averse to making mistakes or experiencing failure. They know failure is part of the journey to success.
Employees who have the potential to become leaders in the organization are those who don’t procrastinate and continue to push forward despite the odds.
They’ll do what is demanded of them but at the same time, they won’t hesitate to share their thoughts and ideas with top management simply because they want the organization to succeed.
3. Adaptive Mindset
In a global economy, the repercussions of an event aren’t isolated to one part of the world. It will have cascading effects across regions. For example, world-changing events such as 9/11, the 2003 Crash of the Equities Markets, the Eurozone Crisis of 2009, and the pandemic have affected the economy of every nation.
For this reason, a rigid and inflexible mindset will not thrive in a global economy. Recruiters want to hire people who have an adaptive mindset. They recognize that the world has turned VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous – and understand that circumstances can change without warning.
Having an adaptive mindset helps them foresee and anticipate these changes so they can prepare alternative courses of action in the event current strategies fall short in delivering results.
Recruiters prefer to hire people who are open-minded and willing to accept new ideas, concepts, and processes. This is an important component for ensuring a productive and progressive organizational culture.
4. Cultural Awareness and Diversity
Talent is never a monopoly of a region. You can find talent across time zones. The most successful companies have long recognized this. As an example, businesses continue to outsource work to other countries not just to cut costs but to capitalize on talent as well.
Inevitably, whether you work in a brick-and-mortar office or from a remote location, you will find yourself working with people from different ethnicities. The challenge businesses frequently grapple with is navigating incidents that encroach on cultural inappropriateness.
Oftentimes, the situation is unintended. It’s normal for people to be simply unaware of cultural differences.
Try to educate yourself on the cultural practices and traditions of other nationalities. If you’re not sure, it’s always a good idea to take the conservative or less risky approach or to simply ask.
For example, many Asian countries observe religious holidays and don’t work. However, there are different religious denominations and therefore, the practices will vary.
So if you find yourself collaborating with people from another nationality who don’t show up for work on a particular date, don’t assume they’re lazy or sick. They could just be practicing their faith.
5. Fast But Firm Decision-making
In business, time is money. Every second that passes by where a decision isn’t made increases the cost of opportunity.
While you’re vacillating on whether to take action or not, another party – your competitor has – and your opportunity to generate sales, get hired, or land an account has just come and gone.
Recruiters want to hire people who have the ability to make quick decisions but are firm about them. They can do this because they have the fourth sought-after skill on this list – adaptive mindset.
Quick decision-makers are able to balance the value of time and the probability of risk. They are willing to execute and implement decisions because they’ve already come up with alternative courses of action in case the desired outcome of the decision isn’t achieved.
If you’re averse to risk, you’ll end up doing a lot of fence-sitting. And in business, if you’re not going forward and just staying still – you’re moving backward.
Speaking of collaboration…
6. Collaborative/Interpersonal
One of the main reasons why companies have shifted their focus on building teams based on cultural fit is to create effective collaboration among individuals.
You can have a team composed of the most talented people in terms of experience, academic achievements, industry awards, and levels of expertise, but if they don’t get along, the team won’t produce the expected results.
Imagine a rowing team where the athletes don’t row at the same cadence or have some participants putting in more effort than others. That boat will be going around in circles instead of a straight line.
The key component to establishing strong collaboration is having excellent interpersonal skills. When recruiters look for someone with excellent interpersonal skills, he’s not just assessing the ability to communicate.
The recruiter is also looking for the ability of the person to willingly engage another person on the team; to reach out and establish rapport. He’s open to the idea of interacting with others.
How will the recruiter test if this skill is present or not with the job candidate?
You might find yourself grouped with the other applicants or with a team of veterans. An HR Officer will ask the group to perform a task. From there, you will be in a fishbowl.
The HR Officer and perhaps an embedded veteran will monitor and evaluate how you interacted or collaborated with others in the group.
7. Business Acumen
Business Acumen is a skill that’s widely overlooked by many fresh college graduates. The university teaches you the fundamentals of business; theories, principles, and concepts that are used by companies to develop strategies to achieve business goals.
But learning theory is different from understanding how these concepts are applied in the real world.
Put simply, Business Acumen is understanding how business works.
What are the current trends in the industry?
What are the pressing issues and concerns faced by businesses today?
Are there laws that inhibit how businesses perform?
How are the equities markets performing?
What are the current economic indicators?
Are there political issues that could affect the growth of the economy?
An inquisitive mind is a prerequisite to developing Business Acumen. When you find the answers to these questions, you begin to formulate scenarios as to how a company – the one you’re applying for – creates strategies that protect its interests.
The recruiter might ask you questions about prevailing issues in the industry and how these impact the company. The idea is to assess your potential and gauge your level of interest in nurturing a career in the industry.
8. Time Management
A study has shown that in an 8-hour workday, the average office worker is productive for only 2 hours and 53 minutes.
That’s a productivity rating of only 36%!
What non-work activities are office workers distracted with?
Scouring the internet for news.
Visiting their personal social media accounts.
Water cooler chatter with office workers.
Looking for new work opportunities.
Smoking!
These distractions are present even if you work from home. You might think “I only spend 5 minutes on Facebook.” Let’s assume you’re being truthful about the time you spend on Facebook, but you’ve been paid for those 5 minutes.
Secondly, the time spent on other distractions will all add up to your total unproductive hours per day.
Can you imagine if you were productive by another 50% or by 2 more hours? Now, if everyone in the office improved their productivity by 50% – the company would be more successful and profitable.
Effective time management is a skill that helps the company become more efficient and productive.
9. Creative Problem Solving
Employees might be faced with a problem that leaves them stumped. The seconds become minutes that add up to hours of unproductive work. Worse, if the problem isn’t resolved, it could have a cascading effect across the company.
Sometimes the answer isn’t found in your college textbook or the training manual. You’ll have to flex your creative muscles and conceptualize the best possible solutions.
Recruiters love candidates who exhibit the ability to “think outside the box”. Creative problem-solving means finding answers when it seems that you’ve arrived at a dead-end. You’re able to pick out features from different theories and personal experiences and develop creative solutions.
Another word for creative problem solving is resourcefulness. These are the types of people who won’t throw in the towel because they believe every problem has a solution – you just have to know where to look.
10. Self-Management
Gone are the days where supervisors micromanage their employees. Micromanaging is not only a time-waster but it also hinders the progress of the employee.
Recruiters prioritize candidates who can work on their own and be entrusted to manage their tasks without the need for much supervision. These are the types of personnel who embrace responsibility and understand the importance of completing their assigned duties.
Fresh college graduates might be micromanaged by their supervisors for the first few weeks. But once the supervisor is convinced that the newbie is consistently delivering results and maintaining the quality of work, they will gladly remove the training wheels.
Hiring people who can self-manage allows the company to optimize its available man-hours and accomplish more goals every day.
Conclusion
As you’ve read from our list, recruiters aren’t only looking for candidates with the requisite technical skills. They are also looking for candidates who are made of the “right stuff”- the personality/behavioral attributes that make you who you are.
Technical skills are referred to as Hard Skills. The personality attributes are called Soft Skills.
In our list, only Technology Savvy, Interpersonal (Effective Communication), and Business Acumen are hard skills. The rest are widely considered by recruiters as soft skills.
Of course, the nature of your job will require you to possess the necessary hard skills to manage the duties and responsibilities that are specific to your profession.
However, recruiters over the last few years have shifted their focus toward identifying people who aren’t just talented but have the right attributes to fit into their organizational culture.
It’s no longer just about what you know but who you are.
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By Seth Godin, an American author and former dot com business executive.
At the top tier of just about any sort of endeavor, you’ll find that the performers have coaches.
Pianists, orators and athletes all have coaches. In fact, it would be weird if we heard of someone on stage or on the field who didn’t have one.
And yet, in the world of business, they’re seen as the exception.
Part of the reason is that work feels like an extension of something we’ve been doing our whole lives. Figure skating isn’t like school, but showing up at work seems to be. “I’ve got this,” is a badge of honor.
And part of the reason is that a few coaches have made claims that stretch belief, and we’re not actually sure what they do. It doesn’t help that there’s no easy way to identify what sort of coach we need or what we’re going to get…
It turns out that the people with the potential to benefit the most from a coach are often the most hesitant precisely because of what coaching involves.
Talking about our challenges. Setting goals. Acknowledging that we can get better. Eagerly seeking responsibility…
And yet we avert our eyes and hesitate. It might be because having a coach might be interpreted as a sign of weakness. And what if we acknowledge our challenges but fail to overcome them? It could be that we don’t want to cause change to happen, or that we’re worried that we will.
One company I admire believes in coaches so much that they’ve put several on staff, ensuring that their leadership all benefit from one. But mostly, it’s something we have to pay for ourselves.
And so, paying for a coach, for something that’s hard to measure, which might be socially awkward, to get better at something that feels normal—combine that with a hesitancy to ask for help—it’s a wonder anyone has a coach.
The paradox is that the very things that hold us back are the reasons we need a coach in the first place.
At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.
It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.
Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.
As scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded.
In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system — called the amygdala — was on high alert for fight-or-flight. As you learned that masks helped protect us — but package-scrubbing didn’t — you probably developed routines that eased your sense of dread. But the pandemic has dragged on, and the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish.
In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless.
Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.
The term was coined by a sociologist named Corey Keyes, who was struck that many people who weren’t depressed also weren’t thriving. His research suggests that the people most likely to experience major depression and anxiety disorders in the next decade aren’t the ones with those symptoms today. They’re the people who are languishing right now. And new evidence from pandemic health care workers in Italy shows that those who were languishing in the spring of 2020 were three times more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.
Even if you’re not languishing, you probably know people who are. Understanding it better can help you help them.
A name for what you’re feeling
Psychologists find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them. Last spring, during the acute anguish of the pandemic, the most viral post in the history of Harvard Business Reviewwas an article describing our collective discomfort as grief. Along with the loss of loved ones, we were mourning the loss of normalcy. “Grief.” It gave us a familiar vocabulary to understand what had felt like an unfamiliar experience. Although we hadn’t faced a pandemic before, most of us had faced loss. It helped us crystallize lessons from our own past resilience — and gain confidence in our ability to face present adversity.
We still have a lot to learn about what causes languishing and how to cure it, but naming it might be a first step. It could help to defog our vision, giving us a clearer window into what had been a blurry experience. It could remind us that we aren’t alone: languishing is common and shared.
And it could give us a socially acceptable response to “How are you?”
Instead of saying “Great!” or “Fine,” imagine if we answered, “Honestly, I’m languishing.” It would be a refreshing foil for toxic positivity — that quintessentially American pressure to be upbeat at all times.
When you add languishing to your lexicon, you start to notice it all around you. It shows up when you feel let down by your short afternoon walk. It’s in your kids’ voices when you ask how online school went. It’s in “The Simpsons”every time a character says, “Meh.”
Last summer, the journalist Daphne K. Lee tweeted about a Chinese expression that translates to “revenge bedtime procrastination.” She described it as staying up late at night to reclaim the freedom we’ve missed during the day. I’ve started to wonder if it’s not so much retaliation against a loss of control as an act of quiet defiance against languishing. It’s a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.
An antidote to languishing
So what can we do about it? A concept called “flow” may be an antidote to languishing. Flow is that elusive state of absorption in a meaningful challenge or a momentary bond, where your sense of time, place and self melts away. During the early days of the pandemic, the best predictor of well-being wasn’t optimism or mindfulness — it was flow. People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their pre-pandemic happiness.
An early-morning word game catapults me into flow. A late-night Netflix binge sometimes does the trick too — it transports you into a story where you feel attached to the characters and concerned for their welfare.
While finding new challenges, enjoyable experiences and meaningful work are all possible remedies to languishing, it’s hard to find flow when you can’t focus. This was a problem long before the pandemic, when people were habitually checking email 74 times a day and switching tasks every 10 minutes. In the past year, many of us also have been struggling with interruptions from kids around the house, colleagues around the world, and bosses around the clock. Meh.
Fragmented attention is an enemy of engagement and excellence. In a group of 100 people, only two or three will even be capable of driving and memorizing information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off serial processing.
Give yourself some uninterrupted time
That means we need to set boundaries. Years ago, a Fortune 500 software company in India tested a simple policy: no interruptions Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. When engineers managed the boundary themselves, 47 percent had above-average productivity. But when the company set quiet time as official policy, 65 percent achieved above-average productivity. Getting more done wasn’t just good for performance at work: We now know that the most important factor in daily joy and motivation is a sense of progress.
I don’t think there’s anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. The lesson of this simple idea is to treat uninterrupted blocks of time as treasures to guard. It clears out constant distractions and gives us the freedom to focus. We can find solace in experiences that capture our full attention.
Focus on a small goal
The pandemic was a big loss. To transcend languishing, try starting with small wins, like the tiny triumph of figuring out a whodunit or the rush of playing a seven-letter word. One of the clearest paths to flow is a just-manageable difficulty: a challenge that stretches your skills and heightens your resolve. That means carving out daily time to focus on a challenge that matters to you — an interesting project, a worthwhile goal, a meaningful conversation. Sometimes it’s a small step toward rediscovering some of the energy and enthusiasm that you’ve missed during all these months.
Languishing is not merely in our heads — it’s in our circumstances. You can’t heal a sick culture with personal bandages. We still live in a world that normalizes physical health challenges but stigmatizes mental health challenges. As we head into a new post-pandemic reality, it’s time to rethink our understanding of mental health and well-being. “Not depressed” doesn’t mean you’re not struggling. “Not burned out” doesn’t mean you’re fired up. By acknowledging that so many of us are languishing, we can start giving voice to quiet despair and lighting a path out of the void.
A big thanks to “Wealthy Gorilla” for collecting these 29 quotes that inspired us from his writing.
It was nice to be reminded of some of the things you’ve written over the years. So I’m sharing them below.
1.) “Always say to yourself, I’d rather be healthy than right. Because the infection of someone so wounded will spread to you if you engage.”
2.) “Being grateful is the bridge between the world of nightmares and the world where we are free to say no. It’s the bridge between the world of delusions and the world of creativity.”
3.) “But business is just a vehicle for transforming the ideas in your head into something real, something tangible, that actually improves the lives of others.”
4.) “Excuses are easy lies we tell ourselves to cover up our failures.”
5.) “Excuses are leaks in a boat. When you cover one, another pops up, and it’s even bigger. It’s hard to keep the boat repaired and get safely to shore if you have an excuse mind-set.”
6.) “Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.”
7.) “He took a survey of personal finance authors who recommend that people keep budgets, and he found that none of them actually kept budgets themselves.”
8.) “I have lots of ideas. How do I pick the right one? Execute on as many as possible. The right idea will pick you.”
9.) “If coming up with ten ideas sounds too hard, then come up with twenty.”
10.) “If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.”
11.) “Luck is created by the prepared.”
12.) “No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care.”
13.) “Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I can’t wait to clean out some shit today.”
14.) “Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of humankind.”
15.) “Only think about the people you enjoy, and only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love.”
16.) “Only worry about your own happiness, which doesn’t have to be limited by anyone else’s stupidity unless you allow it to be.”
17.) “Perfectionism is the enemy of the idea muscle. Perfectionism is your brain trying to protect you from harm—from coming up with an idea that is embarrassing and stupid and could cause you to suffer pain.”
18.) “Someone who is reinventing always has spare time. Part of reinvention is collecting little bits and pieces of time and carving them the way you want them to be.”
19.) “Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.”
20.) “The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky.”
21.) “The only things that really matter in this world are the relationships you have with the people you love, and the meaningful things that you do.”
22.) “The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.”
23.) “There is nobody you need to impress. There is nobody who is judging you. And there will be nobody who can stop you.”
24.) “This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth. It’s a phase where ideas are more important than people.”
25.) “We all want to de-clutter. To throw things out. But a minimalist lifestyle is bullshit unless you can do it across every sheath in the daily practice: not just physical, but also emotional, mental, and spiritual.”
26.) “What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.”
27.) “When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig gets happy.”
28.) “When you give up searching for frontiers, inevitably you end up stuck in a swamp, sinking deeper into the mud the more you struggle to get out.”
29.) “When you rush to get to a mythical there, one day you will arrive and realize you missed all of the pleasures and mysteries along the way.”
This is a tough one…the pandemic has left many of us with a questionable mindset or mental fatigue. Sure, many have become creative, increased their resilience, and feel much stronger because of the pandemic. To you I applaud and say KUDOS! You are an overcomer for sure!
This is for the rest of us whose mental muscles have been stretched beyond their elasticity and has affected our mental fitness far past our comfort zone. You think… “Am I losing it?” “Why is my fuse so short, and what about these anxiety surges? That’s not me! What’s up with that?” “Am I depressed? Is this what depression feels like?”
Hang on my friend, you are not alone – “Depression Has Skyrocketed During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Study Says” Three times as many Americans met criteria for a depression diagnosis during the pandemic than before it, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association.
This appears to be quite a dilemma for those souls that are experiencing some degree of depression, whether it be a loss of self-worth or confidence, feelings of despair with truly little hope, or just an energy drain due to job loss or insecurity. This is very real to these folks! This is serious and no laughing matter. They need HELP! And herein lies the problem…they are told by the “experts” to “ask” for help; We are ALL in this together…yeah right! Good luck with that lie!
You see, “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT! It’s too embarrassing and shameful! It’s a private matter; you think I’m going to show you my weakness? I’ll work it out myself. I don’t need anybody ‘meddling’ in my head or my business. It’s different with me. I’ve never really fit in anyway and have always been pushed by ‘them’ to be ‘like them’…it’s Bullsh..!” LEAVE ME ALONE, THANK YOU!
You see…we are a proud species and even though “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” ~ Proverbs 16:18, we ignore the warning signs and unwittingly hide them in the cellar of our minds.
Negativity has taken over the psyche. The thoughts are no longer pure. The self-talk is poison to the spirit and a downward spiral is in play. Everything looks different. The old healthy perspective is warped and has morphed into a disrupted being that has entered the realm of cognitive distortions. Normal, pre-pandemic behavior and emotional reason has very quickly led us away from the path of reality. What good can come of it?
The short answer is – a lot! Thomas Paine said it best: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” It’s when one’s soul is tried that the most is learned. Inner growth comes from hard times. Help arrives whether we ask from “within” or from “without”. If you are too proud to ask “without”, humble yourself to go “within”, search your heart and your soul; trust that a promised answer will come and you will be rewarded…in full!
The long answer is – it depends! Things could go either way. They can be built up or they can be torn down and disintegrate. “Ugh!” you say. “How do I do this? How will I get through this? I lost my job, I’m too old… It’s too late…I can’t…” You see where this is headed? Yes, toward disintegration. It is “Decision” time! And that’s the best news yet because it is YOUR decision! Still scared? No problem, it happens to ALL of us. Yup, we have all been in the same dark place just at different times; it’s a universal human experience.
Maybe this will help. Depression is not a malfunction or a wiring problem. It is a signal. A message that is telling us something. The first step is to stop insulting these signals, by saying they’re a sign of weakness, or madness, or purely biological. We need to start listening to these signals. They are telling us that something is missing in our lives. They’re telling us something that we really need to hear. We need to honor these signals, respect them, and sincerely listen to what they are trying to tell us.
Something considerably basic in nature is now missing and we have to identify, recognize and reconnect to it. It is only when we truly listen that we begin to see liberating, nurturing, deeper solutions that are awaiting and available within us and all around us. More to come…
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