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Showing posts with label Jim Woods Motivational speaker and career coach. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jim Woods Motivational speaker and career coach. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Finding Our Authentic Self and Our Way to Meaning

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Before the moment of birth, and before our Ambition phase kicks in, each of us is completely aligned with God or the Tao, or whatever name we choose to call the Source of our being. In that pre-form stage of "Fromness," Ambition isn't something we entertain--we have no goals, no aspirations. There's nothing we have to do or take care of, no one to impress or defeat, all we need to do is just be.
  
Our existence in the experience of "From" is precisely what our Source of being intended: free of interference. We are our authentic self. At that stage, we are as much like God as most of us have ever been since.

We come in to this world a perfect creation, but for many reasons, we're encouraged to leave this authentic self behind and to take on a false one. We, and those responsible for our parenting, often disregard that our destiny and all we need to fulfill our dharma is built in to us. With good intentions, we're seduced into becoming a self that is diametrically opposed to who we are authentically.

Imagine a creature proceeding through its developmental journey in form here on Earth, learning and believing that it is something other than what it came here to be. Take, for example, a baby hyena who's told by parental figures that he really isn't a hyena. This baby hyena is forbidden to follow his natural inclinations to frolic, sharpen his teeth, stalk prey, run with the pack, hunt in a group, make noise, or chew the carcasses of animals he's killed. Instead, the young hyena's parents have told him to stop all of the weird behavior like laughing and howling and to sit still while the other hyenas hunt--in other words, to believe that he's something he's not.
  
The point is that everything that's part of creation has a dharma. No animal, bird, insect, fish, or plant can cultivate a false self or believe that it's something other than what the creative Source intended. There's still no evidence to doubt what Emerson once noted in his journal: "All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle." Emerson was making the same point that I am here: that all of God's creatures are authentic and can only be what their dharma intended them to be. Are human beings an exception to God's intention? Some aspects of our development pose that question.
  
We didn't continue to unfold as creation determined, in the same way we did in those first nine months inside our mother's womb. Following that developmental time, we were greeted by parents, a culture, and a host of well-meaning folks representing religious, educational, and commercial interests. They held us, admired the miracle of creation, and looked heavenward, saying, Great work, God! But now we'll take over from here. Thus began our shift to the bizarre twisted world of Ambition.
  
We received metaphorical training wheels and became trainees in the vigorous effort to convince ourselves that we're not a part of Divine consciousness. In the shift to become part of the world of Ambition, we learned to aspire to something totally alien to our "Fromness." This path required us to reidentify ourselves in ways that no hyena or turtle would ever imagine doing!
  
The shift to Ambition requires humans to cultivate an ego, to edge God out. We're trained to believe that who we truly are is whatever our ego convinces us is our true self.
We spend more than half of our life, on average, believing in and relying on the training we underwent concerning the importance of having Ambition. The next big shift is when we realize that a false self only offers empty promises and a guarantee of self-recrimination and futility.
  
As we emerge from the world of Spirit at the moment of birth, we begin the perilous journey of acquiring an identity that's virtually the opposite of our true self. I call this development of the ego or the false self the "Ambition period." It's a sharp contrast to our "Fromness," where Ambition was unknown.
  
Thus begins the journey from being nobody--and feeling content with our nobody status--to being immersed in a curriculum that Ram Dass calls "somebody training." Ego insists that we traverse from nothing to something, from being no one to being someone, from oneness to twoness, from unity to separation. It is this journey that requires us to edge God out and learn to believe in a false self. Ego's number one job at this stage is eliminating our nobody status by encouraging Ambition and creating a new (albeit false) identity.
   
If we want to know pure happiness and live a blissful life, we need to do as Sri Ramana Maharshi says and learn to scorch ego by ignoring it. But ego is adept at resisting our efforts to ignore it, and it will do everything it can to prevent us from sacrificing our somebody status. Ego wants us to be a somebody who is more important than the other somebodies!
  
I've isolated six components of the ego, the false self. They're what our ego tells us to convince us that we're something other than the nobody we might have remained. Beginning with infancy and throughout our somebody training, we learn to believe in them.

1. "Who I Am Is What I Have"
Early on, we learn that the more stuff we accumulate, the more important we are. Our self-concept shifts from feeling that we're valuable because we exist as a piece of God to assessing our worthiness on the basis of how many toys we own, their monetary worth, and how prestigious they're assumed to be by other somebodies in our culture.

2. "Who I Am Is What I Do"
We learn that doing things--especially if we do them earlier and better than others--is rewarding. We learn to be more of a human doing than a human being. A human doing is evaluated on the basis of what he or she does and how it stacks up with all of the other doers. None of this reinforcement for performing is bad; it simply teaches the aspiring human to believe the ego's personalized message of "You are what you do," which is blatantly false. You are not what you do. If you never did a thing in your entire life, you'd still be a spiritual being having a human experience rather than the other way around.  Ego craves confirmation of our value through indicators; Spirit operates on a totally different basis.

3. "Who I Am Is What Others Think of Me"
Throughout life, we're bombarded by ego messages attempting to convince us that our worth comes from the observations and opinions of others. It's necessary to remind ourselves who we truly are. We're Divine pieces of the whole, individualized expressions of God created out of the great void. Our authentic self is the same as that which it came from. Our connection to our Divine self remains healthy and strong as long as we recognize and repudiate the false idea that validation of our self-esteem is external to our being. Self-esteem stems from internally held positive beliefs about ourselves, not from the approval of others. Ego's worldly survival guide dictates that we're physical beings without a core spirituality. It pursues the false idea that our value is determined by what others choose to think about us. If we truly know who we are, we can ignore those ego messages. Believing that who we are is defined by what other people think of us cripples the joyful spontaneity of our authentic selves.

4. "I Am Separate from Everyone Else"
In the ego sense, Ambition wants us to believe that we're the only one who matters. If we're well indoctrinated in this ego belief, it's very difficult to consider the idea of Earth existing without us, or of Earth having a reason to be here in the first place! The key word in these final three components of ego's inventory is separation. If we believe that we're separate and distinct from everyone else, we fulfill the false self's program. But recall that we emerged from nonbeing, characterized by oneness. Ego insists on separation because that's how it undermines allegiance to the authentic self. When we recognize and respect our connectedness to each other; the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the sun we rely on; and, most significantly, the invisible Source we're animated by, the ego can return to its rightful space.

5. "I Am Separate from What's Missing in My Life"
Ego has a vested interest in our believing that there are things missing in our life. It insists that we're not connected to an invisible creative Source because it gets its identity by edging God out. If we start believing that we're permanently attached to God, ego's reason for existence disappears. If there's no place that God is not, then God is in each of us, as well as in everything that our senses interpret as missing from our life. This means that in some invisible manner, we're connected to everything we perceive to be missing. The question might then be, how do we manifest the things we desire that appear to be unavailable? The answer is to realign ourselves in a way that allows what we seek to spiritually harmonize with us.

6. "I Am Separate from God"
In this sixth component, the ego acronym continues to effectively describe our actions of edging God out by believing that we're not the same as what we come from. The God essence and our worldly self remain ensconced in distinct and separate compartments. Ego is terrified that we'll believe we're a piece of God. Its leadership position is doomed if we truly realize our Godness. Naturally, one of ego's primary functions is to keep us believing that we're two very distinct and separate entities.

What does it take to shift out of this detrimental belief system? I suggest we think of our relationship to God or the great Tao by imagining the ocean as symbolic of God, and ourselves symbolized by a small glass of water from the ocean. If asked what's in the glass, we'd say, "A glass of God." If we empty the glass of water on the sidewalk, we'd see it disappear as it vaporized. Ultimately, it would return to its source. While the ocean water is in the glass, separate from its source, it lacks the power of the ocean. But when it rejoins its source, it is once again part of the powerful ocean. That water on the sidewalk having lost its connection to its source is a symbol of ego. via shareguide.com  Excerpted and adapted with permission from The Shift: Taking Your Life from Ambition to Meaning, ©2010 by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, published by Hay House in Carlsbad, CA. Available at your local bookstore or online at www.hayhouse.com.

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.   
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Monday, March 26, 2012

Sarah Ban Breathnach: Savoring Life and Overcoming

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I found this story first published in People Magazine in 1996 on the success of bestselling author Sarah Ban Breathnach absolutely inspiring. In our rush to achieve we often forget the importance of our journey in becoming. There is a reason success can be tumultuous. It forges us to become. Jim

In 1993, SARAH BAN BREATHNACH was a successful journalist, the author of two well-received books on 19th-century life and a wife and mother living in suburban Washington. Yet, like millions of other women juggling too many responsibilities, she was angry and frustrated. "I thought I could only be happy if everything was perfect," says Breathnach, 49. "I wanted to live in a Martha Stewart world."

But instead of buying new slipcovers, Breathnach became what she calls "a detective of my own life." She concluded, six months later, that she had let minor frustrations—bad hair days, cluttered closets—get in the way of contentment. Last year she turned her insights into Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, 528 pages of homey essays—one for each day of the year—with titles on the order of "The Art of Puttering" and "Caring for Your Soul." The book's mantra—"All you have is all you need"—has kept it near the top of The New York Times bestseller list since April, with more than 1.1 million copies in print.

Breathnach, who next year will release Authentic Success, a series of essays on spiritual and material fulfillment, isn't surprised by Simple's appeal. "I knew I wasn't the only woman who was frazzled and at times depressed," says Breathnach, who saw frustration in the faces of her friends. "We were sleepwalking through life." Her commonsense advice: Learn to appreciate little pleasures like a great dish of pasta, a serendipitous discovery at a tag sale, a new lipstick.

Finding an editor who believed in her was no simple task: 30 publishers turned down her initial proposal, which some considered unfocused. "I cried myself to sleep at night," she says. "I really felt I was born to write this book." Her daughter Katie, now 13, began ending her nightly prayers by pleading, "Please help Mommy find a publisher." Eventually, Liv Blumer, then of Warner Books, came to Breathnach's rescue, pruning her 977-page manuscript and releasing it with little fanfare but lots of faith. "I felt it was a word-of-mouth book," Blumer says. "There are some books that are so good, they can't be stopped." Blumer herself offers a dramatic testimonial: The book inspired her to quit her job and join a small literary agency so she could have more free time. "I had this nameless unease," says Blumer. "When I read certain pages in the book, it was like, 'Eureka!' My direction became much clearer."

Breathnach had taken far longer to find her own direction. Born in West-bury, N.Y., to Pat Crean, a construction equipment salesman, and his wife, Drusilla, a nurse, she wanted to be an actress, while her practical mother insisted she go to business school. At 25, Breathnach (a pen name) moved to London, where, she says, "I thought it would be easier to set the world on fire. I was wrong." She worked as a $100-a-week secretary and lived in a grim one-room walkup while auditioning, unsuccessfully, for acting jobs. Breathnach soon gave up the stage and tried writing, but once again there were rejections, until she finally sold a fashion article to a London trade publication. By the time she moved to Washington in 1975, she was accomplished enough to be published in newspapers like The Washington Post—though she still had to work as a secretary to pay the bills.

Then in 1977, after losing a secretarial job, she applied for unemployment benefits and met claims examiner Ed Sharp, now 47, who remembers that Breathnach "seemed very exotic and intriguing." Two years later they were married. After Katie was born, Breathnach continued freelance writing until one day in 1985 when she was lunching in a fast-food restaurant. A ceiling panel fell on her head, causing a concussion and landing her in bed for months. Blurry vision persisted for more than a year.

While recovering in her Takoma Park, Md., home, she became fascinated with some Victorian-era magazines she'd bought earlier. Then she captured her passion for the past in two lifestyle books: 1990's Mrs. Sharp's Traditions and 1992's The Victorian Nursery Companion. Both sold well, but when her publisher asked for another, similar book, Breathnach balked. "I just didn't think I could ruminate on Victorian ruffles for a year," she says. Instead, she ruminated on her unhappiness. "Nothing that I had was ever enough," she says. "I decided I had to put my life in a new perspective." Her soul-searching led to Simple Abundance, which found a small audience before Oprah Winfrey discovered it and, this spring, put Breathnach on her show—and on the bestseller map.

True to her convictions, Breathnach hasn't let fame and fortune shift her back into fast-forward. Her house is still far from Martha Stewart perfect—the kitchen ceiling is peeling, and a retaining wall needs repair. She'll get around to those chores one of these days—after her daily stroll to the post office and her leisurely cup of coffee at her favorite local cafe. Alex Tresniowski and Rochelle Jones 

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. He is a consultant; author, motivational speaker and coach on helping people find meaning and purpose. Email or call Jim at 719-649-4118 to have him speak at your event.

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Thursday, March 22, 2012

Demand Total Accountability to Make Meetings Effective

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Meetings are a fact of life, whether you’re running a three-person startup or a growing company with hundreds of helping hands. But not all managers are born to run them, and that can prove detrimental—in part because unproductive meetings can eat into valuable work time, undercutting the company’s performance and competitiveness.

“Time is currency,” says Jon Petz, “If you’re pulling workers away from their tasks to attend a meeting, you need to think in terms of results, of focus.”

How do you know if your company or team suffers from bad-meeting syndrome? Aside from the obvious signs (lack of eye contact from employees when you speak, too many PowerPoint slides, sub-meetings or texting going on during your meeting), other indicators of unproductive meetings may include the following:

  1. Workers leave meetings without specific tasks and deadlines for completing them
  2. Discussions during meetings don’t lead to decisions.
  3. Brainstorms become complaint sessions versus idea-generating machines.
  4. The meeting rehashes but doesn't advance prior meetings’ accomplishments (what Petz calls a “déjà meeting”).
  5. Meetings force attendance from nonessential employees (“over-invitation syndrome,” in Petz-speak).

Fortunately, taming bad meeting habits isn’t difficult—if you pay attention to a few basics.

Define Your Mission

Petz says meeting organizers need to develop two statements going in: a mission statement that includes goals (make decisions, assign tasks associated with a big project, etc.) and an outcome statement (who will do what as a result of the meeting’s findings?).

For instance, Petz says he was recently in a meeting in which the goal was to narrow a list of five possible technology vendors down to two finalists. If the meeting’s goal had been simply to debate pros and cons of the vendors, its purpose would have been vague and wouldn’t have resulted in a useful outcome—actually selecting finalists. But with shortlist formation as a goal and a time limit for participants to share feedback, the group came to a consensus efficiently.

“I’d say 99 percent of people miss doing an outcome statement,” he says. “If you have an outcome statement—a sense of what your goal is from the meeting—you can end meetings on time.”

Choose the Right Meeting Format

Meetings have different purposes. Is your meeting a short, weekly status update? A brainstorm and pitch session? Is it a problem-solving or decision-making effort? Is it an all-day offsite mixing morale boosting, big-picture thinking and mission building? Are you making major management or business announcements? Or does your meeting incorporate a mix of elements?

Depending on the meeting’s goal and your organizational goals, you may need to rethink meeting formats, says Todd Cherches, a consultant who has worked with clients ranging from small businesses to American Express in his role as co-founder of New York-based Big Blue Gumball.

“Problems with the standard meeting in many organizations are the question of who is running the meeting and whether the meeting is dialogue-based or presentation-based,” Cherches says.

The meeting organizer needs to set expectations. If the meeting is presentation-based, with a leader explaining a new practice or breaking some news to the group, that’s different from a dialogue-based meeting, where attendees might need to prepare by pulling numbers, doing some solo brainstorming beforehand or doing research so that the group can make collective progress.

“You have to let people know beforehand if they have homework,” Cherches says. “Otherwise people show up unprepared and sit back like they’re going to the movies.”

A good meeting is like a stimulating conversation that fires workers up, sending them back to their corners with a sense of mission and excitement about tackling clearly defined next steps and making specific things happen. A bad meeting is like a long, frustrating dinner with in-laws.

First Person
Company: Cerebyte in Lake Oswego, Ore.
Source: William Seidman, co-founder and CEO
Staff size: 4
Strategy: Declaring “early and open discomfort” when a meeting is veering off course.

How it’s going: Management can swiftly see who can make course corrections during decision-making and who can’t, then assign and prioritize tasks accordingly.

When our company swelled to more than a dozen employees, I noticed that meetings had become political, places where staff jockeyed for resources or credit. We said to ourselves, “We’ve got 12 people. What’s going on?” We didn’t want to become bureaucratic.

Meetings are a reflection of a company’s overall performance, and improving performance at a company involves changing the elements of a workplace’s culture. Dan Pink, in his book, Drive , says that if you want to change an organization, you need to have a sense of “compelling purpose.” In the absence of that strong sense of purpose, meetings can be territorial, competitive, status-reporting sessions.

The dot-com crash in the early 2000s forced our company to shrink, but as the years passed and we began growing again, we decided to stay small—we have a four-person team—and hire outside vendors. This means we hold meetings only when all brains need to hash out a decision, or when the team and a vendor need to reach agreement on a scope of work.

The executive team runs meetings according to three key principles: Everyone has good intentions (meaning all are putting the company first); everyone can disagree by calling “early and open discomfort” with the direction a conversation or decision is moving (meaning bad ideas get shut down fast); and a good decision achieved quickly is betterthan a great decision made eventually.

The “early and open discomfort” rule is one of the best meeting tools in the company’s arsenal. We actually call it that. People declare “early and open discomfort” all the time. In a recent meeting, a public relations agency kept insisting that we hire them to provide the latest and greatest social media marketing techniques. We declared early and open discomfort in an effort to reorient what seemed the PR agency executive’s personal agenda to use particular techniques rather than listen to the less-sexy but demonstrated direction we needed from her company.
The PR agency principal kept turning the conversation toward why we should buy or use their services. But we agreed in minutes on how to use social media. We were at a conclusion, and she wasn’t. Finally, I had to become the CEO and say, “This topic is closed.” Ultimately, the tension between the visiting agency and the company led us to shrink the PR agency’s scope of work around a few key social media projects.

If it’s clear that someone isn’t aligned to the core purpose of the company from an interaction in a meeting, you can take action accordingly. But you have to create a culture where honest dialogue is possible.

First Person
Company: Envision Marketing & Design in Waltham, Mass.
Source: Jeff Shaw, principal
Staff size: 5
Strategy: Making sure that employees know the “priorities takeaway” from any given meeting.
How it’s going: Employees revisit who’s tasked with what at the end of the meeting, and someone keeps a running list of “interesting, let’s revisit later” ideas.

We’re a boutique graphic design firm, and meetings can go off-topic as creativity starts churning, with ideas begetting ideas that may not be pertinent to the urgent business at hand. On the one hand, the team needs to think on the fly and listen to flashes of brilliance, but on the other hand, we need to make sure client projects are moving forward and problems are solved.

Before and at the start of each meeting, we define the purpose of the meeting, including what actions and decisions need to be made. This frames the meeting and creates a touchstone to return to when conversation inevitably veers off topic—which is a part of life at a creative agency. When conversation does veer off course, we acknowledge the idea. Typically I say something like, “Good point. We do need to discuss that further. But let’s put that on the agenda for next time because we have a problem we need to solve.” Someone will note the idea for a future revisit.

At the end of the meeting, we go around the room with to-do lists of tasks discussed in the meeting. It may sound a bit elementary, but it works. When there’s a lot of back-and-forth during meetings, it can leave staff with different impressions about what next steps should be. So it’s good to end the meeting by going around the room briefly so people are clear on what they are doing and by when.

First Person
Company: Espresso Supply in Seattle
Source: Myra Gold, general manager
Staff size: 10
Strategy: Using one-on-one assessments and a full-day summit meeting to realign job descriptions and company culture.
How it’s going: Espresso Supply trimmed four jobs and added another, while identifying job growth goals that suit both company goals and employee interests.

When I joined Espresso Supply in November 2009, a lot of job functions overlapped. The company employed a small and hardworking team, but over its nearly two decades in operation, the business had begun enabling some workers to devote more time to work that suited personal interests than work that served the company’s goals. Ideally, a company can permit both personal fulfillment and fulfilling the workplace’s needs, but when in doubt, the company’s goals must come first.

We needed to organize around the functionality of the company, not necessarily what people wanted to do personally inside the company. We were keeping some people for personal reasons—we liked them!—instead of company reasons.

So I and other lead executives here began holding meetings to inventory who actually does what inside the business and sort out what those employees like to do along with what the business needed from the person holding their job title. In one-on-one meetings, I learned who wore what hats and that many of the company’s staff meetings were overly inclusive, requiring attendance by, say, warehouse workers, when really only customer-facing roles like sales and marketing needed to show up. The over-inclusivity was a symptom of overly broad job descriptions, but once those job descriptions were unwound and roles were clearer, meetings could become more efficient.

Once the company finished realigning job descriptions, we held a large one-day off-site so people could reintroduce themselves and their roles to one another, and we could reinvigorate morale around a company-focused—not just people-focused—mission. The off-site demonstrated to workers that the cultural change was all-inclusive—and a big deal, to boot.

I worked with each individual at the company in advance of the meeting to prepare a flipchart with what their role involved. And everyone was given time to share their role and goals while also hearing that every single employee was shifting their role to align with management’s mission. With the culture realigned, the business is more efficient. Weekly meetings are smaller and faster and more targeted, essentially quick huddles, but once every few months the company pulls out the BBQ and shares a noontime meal—just to keep things fun. via success.com

**
Business today is a chess match without rules. Requiring nimble competitiveness in which conventional thinking is discarded. InnoThink Group is provocative. Dynamic. Imaginative and committed to helping our clients out compete for top line growth. Hire Jim Woods To Speak to Your Organization.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter?  

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Managing Yourself to Make the Job Search Work for You

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If you are looking for a job right now, it is certain to take longer than you would like. The culprit is not just the recession — job boards have made it easier to apply, so now it's the norm that hundreds of resumes from across the world chase the same job. With that amount of activity, the job search has become more like a marathon than a sprint.

And because the job search takes longer with so many still out of work, inevitably more people are frustrated, even devastated, by it. Many employers use automated systems to cull the resumes down, which makes the process more impersonal and harder to penetrate.

So how do you keep your spirits up in such a tough environment? I asked this question of several people, including Lila, a Greek marketing professional job-hunting in Athens (which has got to be one of the toughest searches out there).

The best advice Lila gave was to manage your feelings. Becoming negative, cynical, or depressed will work against you. When you get angry with yourself, it shows, Lila says. Don't believe you can easily fake energy and enthusiasm. Most interviewers will pick up your real feelings.

Actively manage your feelings so that you actually are happy, focused, and energetic. Admittedly this is not easy, especially for the millions of long-term unemployed. Here are some changes that should help in this culture of rejection:

Be your own good manager. Since searching for a job is indeed a full-time job in itself, manage yourself appropriately. Bad managers are never satisfied, setting impossible goals and then punishing people for not accomplishing them. Instead, set reasonable weekly goals for networking, researching, or applying for jobs. Reward yourself for accomplishing your goals or doing something difficult. And never beat up on yourself for doing things wrong or not doing enough, the way a bad manager would. The people around you should be good managers too — encourage them to be supportive.

Don't just sit there, do something. This means get out of the house. Take a class. Join a professional group — they generally have special benefits for unemployed members. Volunteer. Check a few things off your bucket list. Do anything that will get you out, teach you something new, connect you with new people, and perhaps become a new line on your resume.

Multitask — don't ride the rollercoaster. Most people put all their eggs in one basket and stop looking at other jobs once they have had an interview. Later, if they are turned down, they become even more discouraged. They then have to fight an uphill battle to motivate themselves all over again. I call this the rollercoaster approach — as the prospects of just one option working out rises and falls, so do your emotions, which I usually draw out like this 

But when you keep initiating new search activity until you get an actual offer, you won't get so depressed if you are turned down for a job, because you're still pursuing other options. And you won't have to start the process all over again: 

Keep to a routine. Manage your time as if you were working. Keep a regular schedule for researching new positions, following up, and volunteering. Work in exercise — you'll look and feel better. A daily and weekly schedule will provide the structure that will enable you to have a sense of accomplishment.

I'm going to give Lila the last word on how to keep your spirits up during a job search. "Remind yourself of the people who love you and that you love back. This positive acceptance from loving and being loved creates miracles. It is a huge hug of protection when you really need to feel safe, while you are in the storm."
Business today is a chess match without rules. Requiring nimble competitiveness in which conventional thinking is discarded. InnoThink Group is provocative. Dynamic. Imaginative and committed to helping our clients out compete for top line growth. To see what we can do for you contact us. via hbr and Priscilla Clyman

Hire Jim Woods To Speak to Your Organization.

Business today is a chess match without rules. Requiring nimble competitiveness in which conventional thinking is discarded. InnoThink Group is provocative. Dynamic. Imaginative and committed to helping our clients out compete for top line growth. To see what we can do for you contact us.  

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter?