Today’s career success advice comes courtesy of Charlie Brown – the Denver city councilman, not the Peanuts character.  In an op-ed piece he wrote for the Denver Post entitled “Put Down Your BlackBerry and Listen to the Citizens,” he urges his fellow city council members to not use their cell phones during council meetings.

At the end of every Denver city council meeting, individual citizens are given three minutes at the podium to speak to the council about any subject they choose.  Councilman Brown said…

“At the end of one recent council meeting, I observed several colleagues with hands below their desktops, eyes focused down, trying hard to hide their frantic texting during much of the public hearing.  The council president called each speaker by name to the podium located a few steps from council members.  But even the close proximity didn’t matter.  Texting continued as some members seemed oblivious to the speakers.”

A little further into his piece, Councilman Brown quoted Denver Mayor Michael Hancock…

“As a former Denver city councilman, I think it is a good idea to limit the use of cell phones during public hearing.  It’s about being courteous to your fellow council members and to those who have come to speak before the council.”

I agree with Councilman Brown and Mayor Hancock.  Tweet 108 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Live people take precedence over phone calls.  Continue in person face to face conversations, rather than answering your cell phone.”

When I wrote this tweet, I was writing about how to become an effective communicator – not about elected officials.  Quite frankly, I was shocked to read Councilman Brown’s op-ed piece.  In my opinion, the public hearing is the most important part of a city council meeting.  Council members need to demonstrate basic courtesy to their constituents by listening to what they have to say.

Setting aside the disrespect that Denver city council members show their constituents, there is some great life and career advice in Councilman Brown’s op-ed piece.

I am really sorry that Women’s Edge Magazine is no longer with us.  I used to find a lot of great career advice and common sense wisdom in its pages.  The January 2008 issue of Women’s Edge made two great quotes that relate to the career advice in Success Tweet 108.

• “Communicate respect in every encounter with every person, regardless of position or background.”  Robyn Hall, Raleigh Police Department
• “Listen and speak at the same time, meaning that you actively engage people with your full attention.”  Judy Fourie, J. Fourie & Company

I urge you to follow these two pieces of career success advice.  They will help you become known as an interpersonally competent person and a dynamic communicator and a life and career success.

Focusing on live people – rather than your electronic gadgets – is the best way to demonstrate your respect for others.  Respect is the key to building strong relationships with the people in your life – not just those who can do something for you, but everyone you meet.  Many people – like some members of our Denver City Council — show a lot of respect for people above them in the hierarchy, and little respect for those below them.  This is too bad.  Often people below you can do as much or more for you than those above you.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that they’re people too, and as such, are entitled to your respect.

The Optimist Creed has some great things to say about respect.  It encourages us to, “Promise yourself to make all your friends feel as if there is something in them…and to give every living creature you meet a smile.”   If you want a copy of The Optimist Creed to hang in your office, go to http://BudBilanich.com/optimist.

Judy Fourie’s quote is interesting for what it has to say about human interaction.  I like the idea of “listening and speaking at the same time.”  In other words, as you engage someone, listen very carefully to what he or she has to say so you can respond appropriately.  What you say should be directly related to what the other person has just said.  This demonstrates that you are listening.  It also demonstrates that you value what he or she says – a great way to show someone that you respect him or her.

Being fully engaged means that, unlike some members of the Denver City Council, you shut out the distractions of the world and focus your attention on the person who is speaking to you.  People tell me that they can never get me on my cell phone.  This is true.  My cell phone is not a good way to contact me because it is usually off.  My cell phone is usually off because I am often in conversations with my career success coach clients.  I don’t want the distraction of a ringing or vibrating cell phone when I’m trying to concentrate on another person and what he or she is saying.

The two quotes from Women’s Edge Magazine above are complementary.  One of the best ways to show others that you respect others is to engage them.  One of the best ways to engage people is to listen to what they say and respond appropriately.  If you keep these two pieces of common sense advice in mind as you meet people, you’ll be on your way to becoming an interpersonally competent person and the life and career success you deserve to be.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  Demonstrate your respect for other people by paying attention to them and what they have to say.  Don’t act like some of the members of the Denver City Council.  Follow the career advice in Tweet 108 in Success Tweets.  “Live people take precedence over phone calls.  Continue in-person, face-to-face conversations, rather than answering your cell phone.”  Focusing on live people – rather than your electronic gadgets – is the best way to demonstrate your respect for others.  Respect is the key to building strong relationships with the people in your life – not just those who can do something for you, but everyone you meet.  Strong relationships are an important key to your life and career success.

That’s the career advice I took from reading Charlie Brown’s op-ed piece on cell phone use during Denver City Council meetings.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.   I value you and I appreciate you.  And, I promise to turn off my cell phone if we every have a face to face conversation.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career advice, all in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new career advice book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get the career advice in I Want YOU… for free by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

As I’ve mentioned frequently, one of the perks of writing this career advice blog is the free books I receive from authors who would like me to review their work here.  I read all of the books I receive, but I review only the ones I like.  I like Act Like You Mean Business: Essential Communication Lessons from Stage and Screen by Rob Biesenbach.

Rob is an interesting guy.  He has worked in corporate communications, has been the Press Secretary for the Ohio Attorney General and has appeared on stage and television.  In Act Like You Mean Business, he begins by saying, “Business and acting are not so different.  Connecting with an audience, expressing idea visually, appealing to emotion, telling stories – these are all important lessons business people can use to communicated more persuasively and effectively.”

I particularly like Chapter 1: “The Power of Story.”  Rob nails it when he says, “Everyone needs to craft his or her own personal story.  One that communicates who you are, as opposed to the things you do.”

Tweet 61 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Create and nurture your personal brand.  Stand, and be known for something.  Make sure that everything you do is on brand.”

If you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve, you need to brand yourself.  Your personal brand differentiates you from everyone else in the world.  Stories can help you build and reinforce your personal brand.

My brand is “The Common Sense Guy.”  Because of my brand, people know that they can rely on me to provide them with common sense advice that will help them reach their life and career success goals.  They also know that they will get this advice in a straightforward, easy to understand and apply manner, because after all, I’m just a guy.

You need to spend time crafting your brand.  Your brand is the two or three words you want people to associate with you.  Decide what you want these words to be, and then go about making sure that all of the people with whom you come into contact think of you that way.  As Rob points out in Act Like You Mean Business, stories can help you do this.

When my name comes up, I want people to think of two things – “common sense,” and “guy.”  I do everything I can to get people to think of me this way.  My writing is simple, straightforward and to the point.  The stories I tell and the career advice I give my career success coach clients is always based on ideas they can put to use immediately – never filled with a lot of theory, even though it is based on the latest life and career success literature.

This is important, because nature abhors a vacuum.  If you don’t brand yourself, others will.  It’s better to be in control of your personal brand by creating it yourself, than it is to let others create it for you.

Steve Jobs brand was “innovator.”  I wrote a blog post on his passing last Friday.  Butch Parrott sent me the transcript of his famous Stanford graduation speech the other day.  I was rereading it just before I began this post.  Check out the story Steve Jobs told as he began his address to Stanford graduates.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Notice how this story does two things.  First, it humanizes Steve Jobs.  When I first heard the bottle deposit part of the story, I flashed on my college days at Penn State when I used to split a 10 cent coke with one of my buddies because neither of us had a dime to buy one for ourselves.

Second, it allows him to make a point about the importance of being tuned into the world around you.  Calligraphy and computer design seem to be worlds apart – until you hear this story.

Let’s get back to Act Like You Mean Business.  Rob Biesenbach says…

“Because they reveal something about ourselves that others can relate to, stories have unrivaled power for breaking down barriers between people and groups.  From there, the doors are open – to connect, to communicate, to persuade.”

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  Dynamic communication may well be the single biggest life and career success skill.  Rob Biesenbach’s book Act Like You Mean Business shows you how to employ acting tools to help you become a great communicator and career success.  I found his chapter on stories and story telling to be really solid common sense life and career success advice.  If you want to become a great communicator, you need to be able to tell your story in a manner that makes other people sit up and take notice.  A good story can really help you build a strong personal brand.  And a strong personal brand is important if you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve.

That’s the career advice I found in Act Like You Mean Business.  What do you think?  Please take a minute and share your thoughts – and stories – with us in a comment.  As always thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career advice, all in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new career advice book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get the career advice in I Want YOU… for free by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

Lisa Giruzzi is a friend of mine.  She is known as America’s Leading Communication Authority for Managers and Supervisors.  Recently I blogged about her new book, Bring Out the Best in Your Employees.  In that post, I mentioned that Lisa’s ideas on communication apply not only to managers and supervisors, but to anyone who wants to become a dynamic communicator. Dynamic communication is one of the keys to career success upon which I’ve built my membership site, My Corporate Climb.

I was so intrigued by Lisa’s ideas on communication that I asked her to write a little more about them for this career success blog.  She graciously agreed.  Check out what Lisa Giruzzi has to say about the importance of attitude when it comes to communication…

Successful Communication Begins with Attitude

When you take the case that communication is a far broader topic then merely speaking, listening, writing, reading, verbal and non verbal, when you recognize that communication is happening in every moment because we are always making meaning, then you can see the significance of this assertion, Successful Communication Begins with Attitude.

Our attitude does more than shape what we say out loud; it shapes how we interpret the world.  This goes beyond a positive or negative point of view or glass half full kind of stuff.  It includes that but really is more expansive. I am talking about the attitudes and beliefs we have developed over time, the ones that are so deeply embedded in our thinking that we don’t even question them.  It is just how we see the world. We forget that it is just our perspective and then we relate to the world as if everyone is seeing it the same way we do.

These deeply ingrained attitudes fundamentally are what we are communicating all the time. We may not verbalize them directly but they are communicated in a myriad of ways – in our speaking, our actions, our choices, our likes and dislikes, our judgments, and our opinions.

The first step to having successful communication with others is to identify underlying attitudes and beliefs and begin to question them.  Most importantly, it is essential to own your attitude and beliefs as only one way to see the world.  It is one perspective.  It is not the right one, or the best one. It is just the one that you formed over time.  And just because it makes perfect sense to you doesn’t make it right or mean that it will make sense to anyone else.

The next step is to accept others perspectives as justifiable interpretations of the world they see, from their perspective they cannot in this moment see it any other way. Arguing with their perspective will prevent successful communication.  Adopting the attitude that both your perspective and their perspectives are legitimate will enable authentic, meaningful communication to occur.  That is why successful communication begins with attitude.

I agree.  Lisa is on to something here.  Your attitude goes a long way in determining your communicationsuccess as well as your career success.

Tweet 124 in my career advice book Success Tweets goes directly to the importance of attitude when it comes to communication and relationship building.  It says, “Everyone has something to offer.  Never dismiss anyone out of hand.  Take the initiative.  Actively build relationships.”  To paraphrase Lisa, adopt the attitude that both your perspective and the perspective of others are equally legitimate.

Successful people have a deep respect for the dignity of each individual.  They have the attitude that everyone has something to offer.  It doesn’t matter if the person in front of you is the President of the United States, your boss, a co-worker, a taxi driver, a security guard or the housekeeper at your hotel.

Cathy, my wife, is the best example of someone who values every person she meets.  She is friends with everyone – the pharmacy techs where we get our prescriptions, the couple who own the dry cleaners where we do business, the supermarket checkout people and baggers, the servers at the restaurants we frequent, and on and on and on.

Cathy is genuinely interested in these people.  She knows their names, their spouses’ names and their kids’ names.  She inquires about their lives.  She knows about their vacations, what grades their kids are in school and lots of other things about them – all because she values them as individuals and takes the time to get to know them.  She is one of the least judgmental people I know.  Lisa would say that she has the correct attitude when it comes to communication.

If you want to create the life and career success you deserve, take a lesson from Cathy.  Adopt an open, caring, accepting attitude.  Pay attention to the people around you.  You will learn a lot and your life will be richer for it.  Don’t judge people by what they do.  Get to know others as individuals.  You’ll be surprised at what you learn.

I have had some very interesting conversations with taxi drivers in New York City.  These days, most of them are immigrants.  They love this country and are well-informed about it.  When I get into a taxi, most often the driver is listening to NPR or an all-news station.  I have had some great conversations about local and national politics, the state of the US economy, and sports with taxi drivers.

In Denver, I occasionally use a car service to go to and from the airport.  This service is a cooperative.  The members of the coop are all immigrants from Ethiopia.  They were all political refugees.  They love this country and are willing to discuss it in depth.  I love my rides to and from the airport with them.

And, I learned something very interesting.  Ethiopia was a Catholic country until the schism in 1066.  The Ethiopian Church sided with the Eastern Church in Constantinople and broke with Rome.  I was raised Catholic, but my father’s parents were Orthodox Christian, or Russian Orthodox as we called them.  In that tradition they celebrate Christmas on January 7 because they use a different calendar.

I remember having two Christmases when I was young.  I always got a small present on January 7.  Imagine my surprise when a guy from Africa told me that he couldn’t drive me to the airport on January 7 because he chose to stay at home and celebrate Christmas with his family.  This led to a very interesting discussion on how Ethiopia participated in the schism.  When the Ethiopian community in Denver was building a new church, Cathy and I were some of the donors.

See what I mean about treating everyone as if he or she has something to offer?  I never would have learned some valuable information about how similar the life experiences of a black guy from Ethiopia were to my own growing up had I not taken the time to engage this person in conversation.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  Successful people follow the career advice in Tweet 124 in Success Tweets.  “Everyone has something to offer.  Never dismiss anyone out of hand.  Take the initiative.  Actively build relationships.”  Following this career advice will help you create the life and career success you want and deserve.  More important, it will lead to a richer and fuller life.  When you have the right attitude, when you engage people, when you expect to find them to be interesting, you will open yourself up to a world of ideas that will not only help your career success, but will also help you succeed as a person.

That’s my career advice based on Lisa Giruzzi’s ideas on how attitude shapes your communication effectiveness.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  One is 140 bits of career advice, all in 140 characters or less.  The other is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new career advice book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get the career advice in I Want YOU… for free by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.PPS : You can get a free Special Report on “The 5 Most Common Mistakes Managers and Supervisors Make and How to Avoid Them,” from Lisa Giruzzi.  It is available at her website: http://www.YourCommunicationAuthority.com.

Lisa Giruzzi is a friend of mine.  She has just released a new book called Bringing Out the Best in Your Employees: The Ultimate Guide for Managers and Supervisors for Engaging and Empowering Employees to be More Successful and Productive Through Effective Communication. That’s quite a mouthful — and it’s quite a good book.

Effective communication is a life and career success skill that we all need – not just managers and supervisors.  That’s why I think that you should get a copy of Lisa’s new book as soon as you can.  Read it cover to cover.  Make notes, and then read it again.  It’s that good.

Lisa begins by suggesting that “communication is everything, and everything is communication.”  This might sound like doublespeak until you think about it.  She goes on to say “We communicate and receive communication through everything we experience.  Out mind is constantly interpreting what we are experiencing.  It is constantly making meaning of the world it sees.  Consequently, everything is communication.”

I agree with Lisa.  She makes a great point here.  We are constantly taking in and processing information.  We are constantly giving off signals that others take in and process.  In my career advice book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less, I focus on three forms of communication important for life and career success: conversation, writing and presenting.  Lisa goes way beyond these in this book – and that’s why I read it with great interest and suggest it to you.

Lisa uses a clever design for this book.  She has written 30 essays on a variety of communication topics.  My five favorite essays are:

• Be Willing to Learn
• Transformational versus Transactional Conversations
• Welcome Dissent
• Successful Communication is 100% Your Responsibility
• Power Over versus Power With.

She follows each essay with a page for taking notes.  She asks the reader to consider four questions on each of the notes pages:

1. What insight did I gain from this essay?
2. What does this insight mean for me personally?
3. What is the boldest action I can take regarding this insight?
4. What will I commit to doing as a result of this insight?

These are great questions that will help you crystalize your thinking on the ideas in the essay, but also help you do something more important for your career success – take positive action for becoming a better communicator.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  You have to be a great communicator if you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve.  Lisa Giruzzi’s new book, Bringing Out the Best in Your Employees, while written for people in formal leadership positions contains some great career success advice –for leaders and people not in formal leadership positions.  Learning and applying the ideas in Lisa’s book will put you on the road to career success – and will probably help you get promoted into a people leader position.  The most important point here is that you can’t not communicate – everything you do and say, every little eye movement or body shift communicates to the people around you.  Get conscious about how you communicate and you will become not only a better communicator, you’ll become the life and career success you deserve to be.

That’s my career advice inspired by Lisa Giruzzi’s new book Bringing Out the Best In Your Employees.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained.  It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened my new membership site on September 1.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  To celebrate the grand opening, I’m giving away a new book I’ve written called I Want YOU…To Succeed in Your Corporate Climb.  You can find out about the membership site and get your free copy of I Want YOU by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.com.

I had a conversation with a prospective new client the other day.  It went particularly well.  It appears as if I will get some significant new consulting business as a result.  As I thought about the conversation that evening, I realized that I followed my own career success advice as presented in Tweets 106 and 107 in my career advice book, Success Tweets.

Tweet 106 says, “Demonstrate your understanding of others’ points of view.  Listen well and ask question if you don’t understand.”  Tweet 107 says, “Become an excellent conversationalist by listening more than speaking.  Pay attention to what other people say; respond appropriately.”

The conversation I mentioned above was a sales call.  You’d think that I’d want to do most of the talking in a sales call.  After all, the purpose of the conversation was to make a sale.  I needed to explain all of the ways I could help this guy and his company.

But that’s not the way things work.  By listening to what he had to say, I got a very good understanding of his problems and concerns.  As he spoke about them, he began to convince himself that he needed my services.  I had to say very little. 

Basically, I listened to what he said.  I made sure that he knew I understood his problems and concerns; I asked questions and I summarized as he spoke.  When the time was right, I shared a couple of stories about my experiences, but in the context of what he was saying.  By doing these three simple things, it became apparent to him that I had the sort of experience that he needs. 

By the time we were finished with the conversation, he was comfortable with me – as a person and as a professional who understands him and his needs.  We set a follow up date to move forward with a consulting project.  In that conversation, I’ll lay out my plan for moving forward and the costs associated with it.  I wish all sales calls were this easy.

This sales call went great because I followed six important conversation steps.

1. Acknowledge the other person as an equal.  You cannot have a good conversation if you don’t recognize one another as equals.  Regardless of your hierarchical relation to the other person – if he or she is your boss, peer or subordinate – remember that we are all human beings.  As such, we are entitled to respect and dignity.  Talk with people, not to them and you’ll be surprised at the quality of your discussions.

2. Stay curious about the other person.  People are fascinating.  I have had some of the most interesting conversations with limo and cab drivers.  Often they are immigrants.  It’s interesting to hear their take on life in the USA.  Be curious about the people you know, too.  People are always growing and changing.  When you express your curiosity you’ll be bound to find out new and interesting things about old friends and acquaintances.

3. Recognize that we need each other’s help to become better listeners.  Help others listen.  Think before you speak.  Speak clearly.  Ask them questions; answer the questions they ask you.  Ccommunication in general and conversation in particular is a process fraught with potential misconnects.  So listen hard to others and make it easy for them to listen to you.

4. Slow down to have the time to think and reflect.  When you slow down, you do indeed have time to think.  Don’t be afraid to pause and reflect on a question.  This shows the other person that you are carefully considering your response – not just saying the first thing that comes to mind.  Other people will appreciate you for your thoughtfulness, not knock you for not being quick or clever enough.

5. Remember that conversation is the natural way for humans to think together.  I love this idea.  The idea of “thinking together” is great career advice.  The world would be a better place if we all “thought together” instead of thinking separately and trying to convince others that our thoughts are better than theirs.  Since this is the season, I would love to see political debates where the candidates worked together to develop an approach to handling a problem or issue – instead of watching them advance their ideas while taking swipes at the other person’s ideas.

6. Expect it to be messy at times.  Conversation is messy.  That’s OK.  In fact, I think it’s great.  Some of the best ideas come out of messy conversations.  The willingness to get into the mess and slop around is what frees your creativity.

I really like the last point – expect it to be messy.  My sales conversation the other day was very messy.  While we stayed on track overall, we also discussed David Beckham, Manchester United Football Club, The King’s Speech, Upstairs Downstairs, bachelor parties and the history of the labor movement in the USA.  Did I mention that this guy is a Brit?  He was impressed with my knowledge of his country and his favorite sport – football, or soccer, as we American’s call the game.  All of this made him more comfortable with me as another human being – not just some consultant come calling to sell him something.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Successful people are great conversationalists.  They follow the career advice in Tweets 106 and 107 in Success Tweets.  “Demonstrate your understanding of others’ points of view.  Listen well and ask questions if you don’t understand.”  “Become an excellent conversationalist by listening more than speaking.  Pay attention to what other people say; respond appropriately.”  Listening takes a bit of work, but it is worth it in the long run.  It will help you become a dynamic communicator and build solid relationships that will fuel your life and career success.  Remember my six keys for conversation success.  They are great career advice.  1) Acknowledge one another as equals; 2) Stay curious about one another; 3) Recognize that we need each other’s help to become better listeners; 4) Slow down to have the time to think and reflect; 5) Remember that conversation is the natural way for humans to think together; 6) Expect it to be messy at times.

That’s my career advice on conversation and career success.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading my musings on life and career success.  I appreciate you and I value you.

Bud

On Sunday April 3 the New York Times Business Section had an interview with Chris Cunningham, CEO of Appsavvy, a social media marketing firm.  Mr. Cunningham’s company has a unique twist to their hiring process.  Check it out.  There is some interesting career success advice here…

“Every job candidate must present to five to seven people as the final step before we hire them…This is where you can make or break it, and we find out if they’re an all-star or whether we just avoided making a bad hire.”

Imagine that – having to make a presentation before you even get hired!

Presenting with impact is a very important career success skill.  It’s really simple common sense; if you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve, you have to be a good presenter.  Yet speaking in public scares the hell out of some people.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Tweet 118 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “Presentations are easy.  Write your closing first, you opening next.  Then fill in the content.  Practice, practice, practice.”

People remember two things about your presentation: how you begin and how you finish.  They remember how you finish because that’s the last thing they hear.  You want to finish strong, reinforcing and highlighting the main points you want people to remember.  That’s one reason for writing your closing first.  This is the best presentation and career success advice I can give you.

Another reason for writing your closing first is because it will help you map out the rest of your content.  You’ll probably have more information than you need for any presentation you make.  If you write your closing first, you can use it to help you decide what information to leave in and what to leave out of your presentation.

For example, when I do my talk “How to Create the Life and Career Success You Want and Deserve” I always end by saying something like…

“And there you have it, my best advice on how to create the life and career success you want and deserve.

“It comes down to Four Cs: clarity, commitment, confidence and competence.

“If you want to create a successful life and career, you have to
a) Clarify the purpose and direction for your life and career. b) Commit to taking personal responsibility for your life and career success.
c) Build unshakeable self-confidence. d) Get competent in four areas: creating positive personal impact, outstanding performance, dynamic communication, and relationship building.

“Hopefully, you know more about how to create the life and career success you want and deserve now than an hour ago.  But, like the US Steel pencils my dad would bring home from work used to say, ‘Knowing is not enough.’  You’ve got to use the information you learned here today if you are going to create the life and career success you want and deserve.”

When I was developing this talk, I wrote this closing first.  I began by listing the key points I wanted to make – in this case the 4 Cs of Career Success.  Any time I was wondering if I should include a specific piece of information in the talk, I asked myself, “Does this information reinforce the point I want people to remember about this talk?”  If the answer was “yes,” I left it in.  If “no,” I took it out.

OK, got it about writing your closing first?  Good.  Now let’s talk about writing your opening second.

You want to accomplish two things in your presentation opening: 1) Capture the audience’s attention, and 2) Give them some idea of what you will be covering in your talk.

When I do my talk, “How to Create the Life and Career Success You Want and Deserve” I always begin by saying something like…

“Hello and thank you for coming.  Today, I want to dispel one of the biggest myths about life and career success.  And that myth is, ‘good performance is enough to create the life and career success you want and deserve.’  Good performance not only is not enough, it is merely the price of admission in today’s highly competitive world.

“If you want to create a successful life and career, think C – no, think 4 Cs…

“Clarity, Commitment, Confidence and Competence.

“If you want to create a successful life and career, you have to:

a) Clarify the purpose and direction for your life and career. b) Commit to taking personal responsibility for your life and career success. c) Build unshakeable self-confidence. d) Get competent in four areas: creating positive personal impact, outstanding performance, dynamic communication and relationship building.

“Over the next hour, I’m going to tell you more about each of these four Cs and show you how to put them to work to create the life and career success you want and deserve…”

See what I mean?  I capture the audience’s attention by telling them that I am going to explode a myth about life and career success.  Then I share the myth.  Then I outline what I am going to cover in the next hour.  This approach to writing and delivering a presentation is simple common sense.

This format is the golden rule of journalism: Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Tell them what you’ve told them.

By writing your closing first and your opening second, you’ve done two of these: you’ve told your audience what you’re going to tell them in your opening, and you’ve recapped what you’ve told them in your closing.  Filling in the content becomes pretty simple once you’ve completed these two steps.

Finally, remember the last three words of Success Tweet 118 – practice, practice, practice.  Practice your presentation out loud.  Practice it until you are supremely confident in what you will say and how you will say it.  A well designed presentation will fall flat on its face if you’re not prepared to give it.  And practice is the best way to prepare for any presentation.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  If you want to create and deliver dynamic presentations that get you known as a high performer, follow the career advice in Tweet 118 in Success Tweets.  “Presentations are easy to create.  Write your closing first, your opening next.  Then fill in the content.  Practice.  Practice.  Practice.”  Writing your closing first gives you the direction you need to create a dynamic presentation.  Writing your opening next helps you capture the audience’s attention and gives you an outline for creating the rest of your content.  I learned this bit of career advice early in my career – way back in 1973 – and have used it ever since.  If you use it, you’ll be on your way to creating the life and career success you want and deserve.

That’s my career advice on creating and giving dynamic presentations.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your presentation stories – the good, the bad and the ugly – with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

My new career success coach book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less is turning out to be quite a hit.  Over 1,000 people have downloaded the free eBook version and several people have purchased multiple copies of the hard copy book.  I think it’s a great addition to my career advice writings.  Go to www.SuccessTweets.com to get a .pdf of Success Tweets for free. 

If you want to purchase a hard copy for yourself – or two or three to give to friends, associates, people you mentor, people you manage, your kids, your grandkids – go to Amazon.com or send me an email at Bud@BudBilanich.com.  I’ll send you quantity pricing information. 

Today’s career advice comes from Tweet 125…

Get to know yourself.  Use your self knowledge to better understand others and build mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Successful people know themselves, have the ability to build and maintain strong mutually beneficial relationships with others, and are able to resolve conflict in a positive manner.

Today, I’d like to focus on the first point – knowing yourself.  There are quite a few instruments on the market that help you get to know yourself.  I am most familiar with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the DISC.  Both of these are based on Jungian psychology and provide you with an easy to understand framework for getting to know yourself.

I believe that we can all benefit from gaining a better understanding of ourselves – what turns us on, what turns us off, what motivates us etc.  However, I think that the real benefit is less than knowing yourself than in using the framework to know other people. 

If you understand other people — what turns them on, what turns them off, what motivates them – you are in a better position to build positive, constructive relationships with them.

I’ll use myself as an example.  The MBTI measures preferences along four continuums:

• Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I)
• Sensing (S) – Intuiting (N)
• Thinking (T) – Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) – Perceiving (P)

I am a slight introvert – that means that I get my energy from within, as opposed to extraverts who get their energy from other people.  I prefer a lot of solitary activities: reading, writing, watching movies, riding my bike.  I get recharged by being by myself.  On the other hand, Cathy my wife, is a high extravert.  She gets her energy from being around other people.

She frequently drives me to, and picks me up from, the airport.  When I come home from a trip, I most often want to relax and look out the car window as we drive home.  I’m an introvert.  I recharge my batteries by getting quiet and going within myself.  Cathy is an extravert.  She wants to talk.  She enjoys having me home so we can interact. 

When I get into the car after a trip, I get myself into a conversational mode.  I ask about Cathy, and what she did while I was gone.  I listen to what she has to say.  I tell her about my trip – who I saw and what I did.  I do this because I love her, and want to do my part to make our relationship as strong as it can be.  I use my knowledge of myself, and my knowledge of her to act in a manner that will strengthen our relationship.

Here’s another example.  One of my clients is a strong S and strong J.  I am a strong N and strong P.  He likes things to be very organized and predictable.  I am more comfortable going with the flow. 

One day, I arrived at his office in the late afternoon.  I was going to facilitate a team building session for his leadership team the next day.  He asked me what I planned on doing in our meeting.  I explained it to him verbally. 

He said, “Do you have an agenda?”  I responded that I just told him what I was planning on doing.  He said, “I heard you, but I’d like to see the agenda.”  I told him I had no written agenda.  He was unhappy with this.  So we spent 15 minutes putting what I told him I planned to do in the meeting on paper. 

I was a little frustrated with him.  He was very frustrated with me.  You might think this is pretty silly.  But there is an important lesson here.  He has high needs for structure, and an agenda is a way to structure a meeting.  I am very comfortable having a rough idea of what I’m hoping to do and accomplish in a meeting and then going with the energy in the room as the meeting unfolds.  This works for me – but not my client. 

The career advice here is simple.  He’s the client, I have to adapt my preferred style of leading a meeting to his needs, or I am unlikely to be successful in building a long term, mutually beneficial relationship with him.  It was up to me to recognize our differences and to adapt my behavior to something that will make him comfortable – not the other way around.

The common sense career success coach point here is straightforward.  Successful people understand themselves.  They follow the career advice in Tweet 125 in Success Tweets.  “Get to know yourself.  Use your self knowledge to better understand others and build mutually beneficial relationships with them.”  Successful people use their understanding of themselves to compare and contrast their needs and wants with the people around them.  In this way, they adapt their behavior to the other person – making it easier to build strong relationships.  The next time you run into someone who looks at the world differently from you, see what you can do to adapt your communication style and behavior to his or her style.  If you do this, I guarantee you’ll be on your way to building a better, stronger relationship with that person.

That’s my take on the career advice in Success Tweet 125.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us on this topic.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud

If you’ve been reading lately, you know that I’m doing a series of blog posts that further explain the career advice in Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less, my latest career success coach book.  I’m going to be sorry when this series is finished.  I hope you’re enjoying reading it as much as I’m enjoying writing it. 
 
Success Tweets has gone into its third printing.  That really pleases me.  It has become a greater success than I thought it would be.  I really appreciate your support.  You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com.  Better yet, you can download it for free at www.SuccessTweets.com. 

Today’s career advice comes from Success Tweet 120…

Practice presentations.  You can control your nerves by practicing out loud.  The more you practice, the less afraid you’ll be.

By now it should be pretty clear that I think that practicing your presentations – out loud – is the most important presentation success tip.  I’ve mentioned practice in the last five success tweets.  Success Tweet 118 ends with three pieces of career advice on delivering dynamite presentations: Practice, Practice, Practice.

Here’s a recap of why I think it is really important to practice your presentations out loud.

Practicing your presentations out loud…

• Calms your nerves.  When you practice several times, the presentation is familiar and comfortable to you.  This makes you less nervous.
• Helps you edit your talk for impact.  There is nothing like saying it out loud to show you the rough spots in your presentation.  Once you identify these rough spots, you can correct them before you’re in front of an audience.
• Helps you get better.  The more times you repeat a talk out loud, the better it gets.  It’s almost impossible to be over prepared.  Practice does indeed make perfect.

These three reasons should convince you that it’s important to practice your talk out loud. 

Yet, I am always amazed that so many people don’t take the time to practice.  They have some great excuses…

• It takes too much time.
• I know what I’m going to say, I don’t need to practice.
• I feel foolish talking to myself.
• I won’t get any better.
• I’ve done this talk a million times, I don’t need to practice.

And I say, “WRONG!!!” 

Practice is the main ingredient of any successful presentation – not funny slides and animation – practice.  And it is the thing that many people refuse to do.  I don’t get it.

The common sense career success advice here is simple.  If you want deliver a great presentation, you need to practice it out loud.

Thomas Edison is famous for saying, “Many people miss opportunity because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.”  I am semi famous for saying, “Most people know the right thing to do in most situations, their common sense tells them.  They don’t use their common sense for a bunch of bogus reasons.” 

So don’t come up with bogus reasons for not practicing your presentations out loud.  If you want to become a dynamic communicator, and create the life and career success you want and deserve, you have to practice your talks – out loud.  That’s some of the most important career advice I can give you.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  If you want to deliever dynamic presentations you have to follow the career advice in Tweet 120 in Success Tweets.  “Practice presentations.  You can control your nerves by practicing out loud.  The more you practice, the less afraid you’ll be.”  Besides controlling your nerves, you’ll get better each time you practice.  Trust me on this career advice; time spent practicing a presentation is time well spent.

That’s my take on the career advice in Success Tweet 120.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading – and commenting.

Bud

I’m continuing my series of blog posts that further explain the career advice in Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less, my latest career success coach book.  I’m going to be sorry when this series is finished.  I hope you’re enjoying reading it as much as I’m enjoying writing it. 
 
Success Tweets has gone into its third printing.  That really pleases me.  It has become a greater success than I thought it would be.  I really appreciate your support.  You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com.  Better yet, you can download it for free at www.SuccessTweets.com. 

Today’s career advice comes from Success Tweet 119…

Discipline yourself to prepare for presentations.  Practice out loud until you are totally in sync with that you’re going to say.

Many people fear making presentations.  That’s why they’re not very good at them.  I subscribe to James Malinchak’s ezine.  It’s always full of interesting anecdotes.  A couple of years ago, James told a very interesting story about a conversation he had with Michael Jordan.  He posed the following scenario to Michael…

It’s Game 7 of the NBA Finals and your team is playing on the road at your opponents place. There’s 00:01 second left on the clock and your team is losing by 1 point. You’re at the free-throw line to shoot two shots.  This is literally win or lose time, and the ball is in your hands. If you make both free throws, your team wins their first ever championship. If you miss both, your team loses the championship.  How would you feel?”

Michael Jordan’s reponse…

That’s easy! That situation wouldn’t bother me because I would have already disciplined myself to make sure I had already prepared for success in that, or any other situation!
 
James went on to say…

Not the answer I was expecting, but it’s very profound when you think about those two words that most would rather simply skim over: 1) Disciplined; and 2) Prepared.  The more I thought about those two words, the more I began to realize just how important they are for becoming a succsessful speaker, author, trainer or coach.  Most people are not disciplined to prepare themselves for success.

James is on to something here.  Disciplined preparation is great career advce.  It is the key to not only becoming a dynamic communicator and great presenter.  it is the key to creating the life and career success you want and deserve. 

In the post on Success Tweet 118, I shared the five step model of presentation success that I teach my career success coach clients.  The fifth point is “practice, practice, practice.” 

I suggest not just practicine your talk, but practicing it out loud using your visuals.  Do this as many times as it takes to become 100% comfortable with what you are going to say and how you are going to say it.  Pay attention here.  This is important career success advice.

When I say this to my career success coach clients, I am often met with frowns and a lot of excuses about not having the time to do the kind of preparation I suggest. 

And that’s why many people suck at presenting.  In Michael Jordan and James Malinchak’s words, they don’t have the personal discipline to prepare for a successful presentation.  Without disciplined preparation it’s basically impossible to do a good presentation.  If you can’t good presentations, you’ll never create the life and career success you want. 

Cathy and I were in Florida last year to celebrate our niece’s wedding.  Cathy was hosting a bridesmaid luncheon.  The night before the luncheon, she practiced the welcoming talk she was going to give at the luncheon at least five times. 

And you know what?  It got better every time she practiced it.  She practiced one more time the morning of the luncheon, and she had it down cold.  She disciplined herself to prepare for her talk.  She was ready to do it.  And she gave a killer talk.  Good for her.

Cathy often accompanies me when I travel.  If I am doing a talk the next day, she knows my ritual before going to bed.  I will practice my talk – out loud – at least twice, or as many times as it takes for me to feel that I have it perfected.  It takes a little bit of time to practice like this, but the audience applause and, more important, my feeling of satisfaction after delivering a great talk are worth it.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Successful people are dynamic communicators.  Dynamic communicators are good presenters.  They follow the career advice in Tweet 119 in Success Tweets.  “Discipline yourself to prepare for presentations.  Practice out loud until you are totally in sync with that you’re going to say.”  As Michael Jordan and James Malinchak point out, disciplined preparation is a key to success in any endeavor – from basketball to business.  Disciplined preparation is especially important to becoming a great presenter.  If you want to become a great presenter discipline yourself to prepare for your talks by practicing – out loud and with your visuals – until you are totally in sync with what you are going to say and how you are going to say it.

That’s my take on the career advice in Success Tweet 119 and on disciplined preparation and becoming a great presenter.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment.  Share your presentation victories and horror stories with us.  We can all learn from, and help, one another.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud

If you’ve been reading lately, you know that I’m doing a series of blog posts that further explain the career advice in Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less, my latest career success coach book.  I’m going to be sorry when this series is finished.  I hope you’re enjoying reading it as much as I’m enjoying writing it. 
 
Success Tweets has gone into its third printing.  That really pleases me.  It has become a greater success than I thought it would be.  I really appreciate your support.  You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com.  Better yet, you can download it for free at www.SuccessTweets.com. 

Today’s career advice comes from Success Tweet 118…

Presentations are easy to create.  Write your closing first, your opening next.  Then fill in the content.  Practice.  Practice.  Practice.

Writing your presentation closing first is the best presentation and career advice I can give you.

People remember two things about your talk.  How you begin and how you finish.  They really remember how you finish because that’s the last thing they hear.  You want to finish strong, reinforcing and highlighting the main points you want people to remember.  That’s one reason for writing your closing first.

Another reason for writing your closing first is because it will help you map out the rest of your content.  You’ll probably have more information than you need for any presentation you make.  If you write your closing first you can use it to help you decide what information to leave in and what to leave out of your presentation.

For example, when I do my talk “How to Create the Life and Career Success You Want and Deserve” I always end by saying something like…

And there you have it, my best advice on how to create the life and career success you want and deserve.

It comes down to Four Cs: clarity, commitment, confidence and competence.

If you want to create a successful life and career, you have to

a) Clarify the purpose and direction for your life and career.
b) Commit to taking personal responsibility for your life and career success.
c) Build unshakeable self confidence.
d) Get competent in four areas: creating positive personal impact, outstanding performance, dynamic communication and relationship building.

Hopefully, you know more about how to create the life and career success you want and deserve now than an hour ago.  But like the US Steel pencils my dad would bring home from work used to say, “Knowing is not enough.”  You’ve got to use the information you learned here today if you are going to create the life and career success you want and deserve.

As I leave you today, I want to challenge you.  I want to challenge you to take at one thing you’ve learned here today, and put it to work tomorrow.  Do the same the next day.  And the day after that.  Because remember, knowing is not enough.  You have to put your knowledge to work if you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve.

When I was writing this talk, I wrote this closing first.  I began by highliting the key points I wanted to make – in this case the 4 Cs of  career success.  Any time I was wondering if I should include a specific piece of information in the talk, I asked myself, “Does this information reinforce the point you want people to remember about this talk?”  If the answer was “yes,” I left it in.  If “no,” I took it out.

OK, got it about writing your closing first?  Good.  Now let’s talk about writing your opening second.

You want to accomplish two things in your presentation opening: 1) Capture the audience’s attention, and 2) Give them some idea of what you will be covering in your talk.

When I do my talk “How to Create the Life and Career Success You Want and Deserve” I always begin by saying something like…

Hello and thank you for coming.  Today, I want to dispel one of the biggest myths about life and career success.  And that myth is “good performance is enough to create the life and career success you want and deserve.”  Good performance, not only is not enough, it is merely the price of admission in today’s highly competitive world.

If you want to create a successful life and career, think C – no think 4 Cs…

Clarity, Commitment, Confidence and Competence.

If you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve, you have to:

a) Clarify the purpose and direction for your life and career.
b) Commit to taking personal responsibility for your life and career success.
c) Build unshakeable self confidence.
d) Get competent in four areas: creating positive personal impact, outstanding performance, dynamic communication and relationship building.

Over the next hour, I’m going to tell you more about each of these four Cs and show you how to put them to work to create the life and career success you want and deserve…

See what I mean?  I captured the audience’s attention by telling them that I was going to explode a myth about life and career success.  Then I shared the myth.  Then I outlined what I was going to come over the next hour.

This format is the golden rule of journalism: Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Tell them what you’ve told them.

By writing your closing first and your opening second, you’ve done two of these, you’ve told your audience what you’re going to tell them, and you’ve recapped what you’ve told them.  Filling in the content becomes pretty simple once you’ve completed these two steps.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  If you want to create dynamic presentations that communicate and get you known as a high performer, follow the career advice in Tweet 118 in Success Tweets.  “Presentations are easy to create.  Write your closing first, your opening next.  Then fill in the content.  Practice.  Practice.  Practice.”  Writing your closing first gives you the direction you need to create a dynamic presentation.  Writing your opening next, helps you capture the audience’s attention and gives you an outline for creating the rest of your content.  I learned this bit of career advice early in my career – way back in 1973 — and have used it ever since.  It is powerful.  If you use it, you’ll be on your way to creating the life and career success you want and deserve.

That’s my take on the career advice in Success Tweet 118.  What’s yours?  What presentation creation tips and tricks can you share with us?  Please take a minute to share them in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud