Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
PERSONAL COACHING Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
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On Tuesday afternoon (April 23), Robert Prechter, a famed market technician known for calling the roaring bull market of the '80s, the 1987 crash and the March 2009 stock market low, published an urgent new issue of his Elliott Wave Theorist.
This issue is so powerful -- and so urgent -- that EWI has unlocked the first two pages for you to read with no obligation to buy.
Every issue of the Theorist provides you with a unique look at tomorrow's news today. This issue meets that high standard and more. It's one of the most powerful and revealing issues of the Theorist subscribers will ever read. Now, Prechter is not always right. Unfortunately, no market analyst is. But there's one thing his readers know for certain: When Prechter revs up his urgency, he sees something big on the horizon.
Due to the timely nature of this issue, EWI cannot make the first two pages available indefinitely, so they've set a date of May 8 to end this special promotion -- at which time the first two pages will no longer be available for free.
SAP (Systems-Applications-Programs) AG, a global provider of business software, has implemented coaching programs based on effective personal development accomplishing business goals while meeting the challenges of the coachee's professional role in an optimal way. SAP leadership has been following these prevailing coaching issues from:
After six years, the "leader as coach" pool in Germany comprises more than 70 internal part-time coaches (i.e. coaches who work as a coach besides their main role/activity) coming from all levels of hierarchy and functions.
The return on investment (ROI) of coaching can be enormous, especially in the context of project management. The following feedback may illustrate this point: "Coaching helped us prevent a potential project loss of at least Euros 100,000, because an excellent project lead found a way to manage tremendous task overload for almost a year."
An insight is a thought we've never had before. It's a fresh thought.
Insights are those "Aha! moments" when the clouds part and the solution to your problem arises right in front of you. They happen when fresh new light is spread on a subject you've considered for some time. We all have experienced these moments of deep understanding, even if we might not know what to call them or how to describe them.
An insight is a discovery or realization that goes beyond face value, beyond the obvious. It is a deeper, more universal understanding that is often very relevant to you. With insight, a new cognitive structure is formed that is different from the sum of its parts, and it usually calls for a different action.
While the circumstances in which people have their insights are as varied as the individuals, everyone has reported a common state of mind. It's an easy going, unpressured, open, and ungripped state. The more often you reside in this state of mind, the more often you will have insights.
Conversely, when you are agitated and bearing down with your thinking, insights become more elusive. While the Insight State of Mind is our natural, default state, we inadvertently think ourselves out of it.
A strategic insight is a simplifying "Aha! moment" that often radically redefines business and the competitive advantage. Once articulated, these strategic insights seemed like simple common sense to everyone. They are easily understood and acted upon. In fact, implementation usually occurs with far less effort than forced march that often characterizes strategy implementation.
The Art of Insight is a new book that teaches readers how to have more "Aha! moments" in life. Based on the authors' years of research, reflection, and experiences, The Art of Insight presents practical methods of recognizing and cultivating an Insight State of Mind. Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable describe these thinking methods that are designed to foster fresh thoughts and perspectives. But this is not a rigid set of rules--it's a creative pursuit.
The unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration's disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.
U.S. labor force participation rates fell last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a Baby Boomer generation headed to retirement.
Economists say relatively few people are likely to trade their disability checks for paychecks, in part because the program doesn't give much incentive to leave. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has worried that the financial crisis would lead to a permanent loss of workers, setting up what economists call hysteresis, a term borrowed from physics to describe temporary market changes that lead to permanent economic losses.
It is no longer a theoretical problem, said David Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied the disability program. The economy has a case of hysteresis, he said, created by the permanent transfer of workers to disability rolls.
Many newcomers to the disability roster are low-wage earners with limited skills, Mr. Autor said, and they are "pretty unlikely to want to forfeit economic security for a precarious job market."
Payments, tied to a worker's wage history, average $1,130 a month, which totals $13,560 a year. That is about $2,000 a year more than the federal poverty level for a single person and about $2,000 less than full-time wages at the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.
After two years, people on disability are eligible for Medicare health insurance—another government benefit that encourages recipients to stay put. In 2011, the latest data available, fewer than 0.5% of beneficiaries left disability rolls to work again. Most leave the program by advancing to the Social Security retirement program, or they die.
Researchers are finding that wearing a smile brings certain benefits, like slowing down the heart and reducing stress. This may even happen when people aren't aware they are forming a smile, according to a recent study. The work follows research that established that the act of smiling can make you feel happier.
A study published in the journal Psychological Science found that people who smiled after engaging in stress-inducing tasks showed a greater reduction in heart rate than people who maintained a neutral facial expression. The study, which involved 170 participants, got people to smile unknowingly by making them hold a pair of chopsticks in three different ways in their mouth. One way forced people to maintain a neutral expression, another prompted a polite smile, and a third resulted in a full smile that uses the muscles around the mouth and the eyes.
"We saw a steeper decline in heart rate and a faster physiological stress recovery when they were smiling," even though the participants weren't aware they were making facial expressions, says Sarah Pressman, co-author of the study and an assistant psychology professor at University of California, Irvine.
Studies have found that the intensity of a person's smile can help predict life satisfaction over time and even longevity. What's unclear is whether smiling reflects a person's overall happiness or if the act of smiling contributes to that happiness. Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale University, believes it is a bit of both.
"It's probably bidirectional," she says. "People who smile more tend to elicit more positive connections with other people," which in turn help make you happier and healthier.
And what effect do people who smile have on others?
Experts say there is a real positive impact. Marco Iacoboni, a lab director at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, says when people see a smile, so-called mirror neurons fire in their brain and evoke a similar neural response as if they were smiling themselves.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2013
You may be surprised to know that it’s not that difficult to figure out your life’s purpose. You can at least get moving in the right direction in less than 15 minutes.
After determining your purpose, the next step is to figure out how to live out that purpose every single day.
While there are countless ideas out there to answer that question, the following three have proven timeless for me since I started asking 40 years ago.
1. Ask yourself the right questions.
Andy Andrews, the author I have managed for the past 33 years, has taught me that the quality of our questions determines the quality of our answers. So why not ask yourself the best quality questions?
Part of my purpose in life is to be a joy to others, to create lots of laughter. By asking myself How can I be a joy to this person today? or How can I make this meeting really enjoyable? my mind naturally starts to focus on finding an answer and moving me toward accomplishing that purpose.
2. Write!
Legendary business executive Lee Iacocca said, “The discipline of writing something down is the first step to making it happen.”
When you write something down, it solidifies that idea. It’s also really helpful to review that material later on. I write down everything, my goals, my prayers, quotes, ideas... If you want to live with your purpose in focus, have your purpose written down always close within sight.
3. Deal With Your Fear
Deep down, we all start out fearing rejection. We want to be accepted. No one likes getting shot down.
Here’s a great way to flip fear on its head—seek it out. When I was first starting my career as a manager and was trying to get bookings for a comedian, I made it my mission to get 30 “no’s” every day. Instead of fearing rejection, I was now seeking it out.
The best part? I never succeeded in getting 30 “no’s” in one day! Inevitably, I always got a “yes.” Whatever your fear is—reality is never as scary. Simply step up and face it.
Stop waiting for the right time to live out your purpose. Right now, determine what you can do in the next 15 minutes to begin living purposefully with massive action.
Robert D. Smith is the author of 20,000 Days and Counting, a crash course in living every day with maximum purpose and intensity. He blogs on entrepreneurship, personal growth, and more at TheRobertD.com.
In order to rediscover our natural confidence and live a fearless life, we must examine the challenge: we must "recognize fear."
Fear, for the neurophysiologists, is a stimulus to investigate, discern and resolve. Taking a Buddhist perspective on fear, however, requires that we make a simple, yet somewhat outrageous, observation: fear does not exist. This is not to say we don't experience fear and its many forms. Of course, we are afraid of death and pain, afraid that we can't handle life. We fear new situations and the unknown. Yet, while we may want to define fear, explore fear, and possibly even resolve it, we first must acknowledge that we cannot actually find such a solid thing as "fear" at all.
In order to recognize fear, then, we need to examine our experience, right here, right now. When the elusive, uncertain nature of life shifts from background to foreground, as it always does, we struggle and panic. Falling in love with a colleague, being diagnosed with cancer, or just missing an appointment, we instinctively sense that life happens in a way that we cannot grasp, and we become bewildered. Becoming familiar with such bewilderment is how we examine and recognize fear.
We breed cowardice with story lines of all kinds: "I'm freaked out because I am going to lose my job and won't be able to handle life!" or "I think my foot has cancer--it hasn't been behaving itself lately." Yet, when we are completely honest with ourselves, we discover not only that we are primordially exposed but that panicking is optional. Being exposed to life is sharply real and unavoidable, but being a coward is not required. And by leaping in with no guarantees, we stop seeking a life free from fear, but instead discover how to live life fearlessly.
Fear of the Unknown
Conor Mayo-Wilson, a researcher of mathematical philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, studies how people learn and solve problems by sharing information in groups. These groups, however different, take advantage of a diverse range of experiences and knowledge, so it’s reasonable to think that collective intelligence might come to a more accurate conclusion than any one individual. But research done by Mayo-Wilson and others shows that this isn’t exactly the case.
For instance, we know today that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, Mayo-Wilson said. Scientists were making connections between bacteria and stomach ulcers as early as 1889. But in 1954, Edward Palmer published a paper that claimed to find no bacteria whatsoever in 1,000 human stomachs. Palmer’s study was flawed, but knowledge of that paper spread faster and more widely than the earlier work. Soon everybody knew that bacteria couldn’t live in the stomach, but what they knew was completely false. Linking people into virtual groups enables the sharing of knowledge, but when that information isn’t accurate, it can lead the group consensus astray causing widespread fear of the unknown. “When information comes from a common source, that can cause problems with individual decision making, because it can eradicate minority viewpoints,” Mayo-Wilson said.
Mayo-Wilson said, “How those people receive information can influence whether or not they make a good decision.” The group itself isn’t what matters. What matters is who they are, what they know and how they interact.
At least 15 million American adults say they have had a near-death experience, according to a 1997 survey—and the number is thought to be rising with increasingly sophisticated resuscitation techniques.
The once-taboo topic has gotten a lot of talk these days. In the movie "Hereafter," directed by Clint Eastwood, a French journalist is haunted by what she experienced while nearly drowning in a tsunami. A spate of books details other cases and variations on the theme.
Yet the fundamental debate rages on: Are these glimpses of an afterlife, are they hallucinations or are they the random firings of an oxygen-starved brain?
"There are always skeptics, but there are millions of 'experiencers' who know what happened to them, and they don't care what anybody else says," says Diane Corcoran, president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, a nonprofit group in Durham, N.C. The organization publishes the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
As a 17-year-old college student, I had a near-death experience (before it was categorized as such) during an automobile accident. During this intense positive experience, I said to myself, "If this is what it is like to die, it's not all bad." For I was at peace; calmly watching my "life review" play out while time seemed to stand still. That experience forever changed how I lived the rest of my life; for I no longer feared death nor failure as I led a passionate life.
Sudden Discovery
Our ability to suddenly discover a powerful seat of fearless abundance may not be all that fantastic. In fact, rediscovering this fearless abundance is considered more likely than we think and is traditionally often referred to as "discovering the wish-fulfilling gem." Discovering the gem is said to happen abruptly, like winning a lottery, thus opening up a sudden physical and spiritual energy similar to that of riding a mighty horse. This frees the mind of impoverishment and revels the natural state of fearless abundance.
Ironically, this abundance of suddenly discovering a wish-fulfilling gem within our very state of mind is a not a "personal" experience, so to speak, but something larger and more fundamental. Just as a sparrow flies with ease or a tiger walks with confidence, so too we discover the jewel-like ease and wealth of our humanness. We relax back into our unshakable confidence that we, too, are exquisitely equipped to be on this planet under all circumstances.
With Christmas and New Year’s Day falling on Tuesdays in 2012-13, employers’ year-end holiday calendars will be much kinder to workers than in the previous two years, according to Bloomberg BNA’s survey of employers’ year-end holiday plans.
Almost three-fifths of the surveyed employers (58 percent) have scheduled at least three paid days off for the 2012-13 holiday season, compared with about two out of five establishments responding for 2011-12 (42 percent) and 2010-11 (36 percent), when the national holidays fell on the weekend. The survey also suggests some recovery in holiday gifts, bonuses, and party-giving from levels observed around the end of the recession.
Holiday celebrations are on the slate at roughly three out of four surveyed establishments (74 percent), somewhat improved from 2009, when 67 percent sponsored any late-year festivities. Company-wide events are planned by more than half of the responding employers(55 percent), virtually unchanged from a year ago (56 percent) and up a bit from 2009 (50 percent).
A long Christmas weekend is on tap for many U.S. workers this year. Just over half of responding employers (51 percent) have slated Monday, Dec. 24 as a paid day off.
Manufacturers’ holiday schedules remain decidedly more generous than those of nonmanufacturing firms and nonbusiness establishments. The vast majority of surveyed manufacturing firms (85 percent) will grant three or more paid days off during the upcoming holiday season, compared with barely half of both nonmanufacturing companies (52 percent) and nonbusiness organizations (51 percent), such as hospitals, schools, and government agencies.
Workers in small shops stand a better chance of an extra day off than their colleagues in bigger organizations. Nearly two-thirds of companies with fewer than 1,000 employees (65 percent) have scheduled three or more paid days off during the 2012-13 holiday season; less than half of larger employers (48 percent) will be so generous.
Charitable activities remain a holiday tradition among a majority of U.S. employers. More than three out of five establishments (63 percent) will sponsor charitable endeavors around year’s end; most of those firms will participate in multiple programs and activities.
Toy and food collections remain the predominant forms of employer-sponsored charity. Forty percent of all responding employers will sponsor toy collections for needy children; food collections and distribution follow closely behind, at 37 percent. Clothing drives are planned by one in five surveyed employers, and nearly as many (16 percent) will sponsor money collections.
As my holiday gift to you and your friends on Dec. 10 & 11 only at Amazon.com, I am giving the new ebook “Ask the Coach” to download on your smartphone, eReader, tablet or computer. Please note that “Ask the Coach” is a reference book; like a dictionary or any other similar resource book that is not meant to be read cover to cover. Readers would normally look up a question of interest in the Table of Contents and then proceed to read that self-coaching answer in the book.
The insights in this book are meant to help you develop the leadership skills necessary to become the master of yourself so you will be ready, willing and able to lead others. Self leadership happens through self-learning and self-coaching.
As personalization becomes ubiquitous, the segmented profiles that advertisers, publishers and even presidential candidates use to define us may become more pervasive and significant than the identities we use to define ourselves.
Our consumer profiles are beginning to define us in all of our online interactions, and a result may be that we get different prices at the mall — or different news articles and campaign ads on our mobile devices — based on a hidden auction system that we’re unable to alter or control. The travel site Orbitz, after learning that Mac users spend 30 percent more on hotel rooms than P.C. users, has started to send Mac users ads for hotels that are 11 percent more expensive than the ones that P.C. users are seeing, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said that mobile devices would soon “do things we haven’t begun to think of,” like storing details of our preferences and tastes and offering location-based suggestions that anticipate our desires and our questions before we’ve even asked them. Advertisers compete in an auction for the opportunity to send ads to individual consumers. Each time a company buys access to us, it can bombard us with an ad that will follow us no matter where we show up on the Web.
Since 1994, when Lou Montulli, an employee at Netscape, created the cookie as a way of distinguishing online shoppers, it has been possible to track the activities of individual users on particular Web pages. It wasn’t until the following decade, however, that real-time bidding first used cookies to tag individual Web browsers so that their users could be sent display ads at various Web sites. This makes it possible to build comprehensive profiles of users and then conduct an auction among advertisers to show a display ad to targeted users across tens of thousands of Web sites.
The stories we see on the Web, on TV and on our mobile devices could be pegged to the market segments in which advertisers have placed us.
As our experiences become customized, there is more at stake than just discount coupons and deals. There’s also the future of our common culture. As personalization shapes not only the ads we see and the news we read but also the potential dates we encounter and the Google search results we receive, the possibility of not only shared values but also a shared reality becomes more and more elusive. In his book “The Filter Bubble,” Eli Pariser describes the social consequences of a personalized culture, which is the core strategy for Google, Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube — which hope to present us with information that’s so directly relevant to our lives that they can sell more ads to which we’re likely to respond.
As Pariser puts it, “Personalization can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you’ve clicked on in the past determines what you see next — a Web history you’re doomed to repeat. You can get stuck in a static, ever-narrowing version of yourself — an endless you-loop.”
Source: The New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2012
Our natural talents are gifts at birth. We had nothing to do with them. However, we have a great deal to do with becoming aware of them. It is up to us to discover our natural signature talents and transform them through focus, practice and learning into strengths.
Our first awareness of what comes easy happens in late childhood or adolescence. We then build on these competencies in our first job or when some other transitional situation occurs that demands we use one or more of our innate talents more purposefully. Focusing on what matters helps us reach clarity.
As the years go by, we practice those things that come easily to us as we build our natural talents into strengths. Concurrently, we experience what doesn’t come easy to us, while trying not to overplay our talents, as we work around and underplay our weaknesses. The result is we undermine our destiny by attempting to live within our limitations.
This new book reminds us that we have spent our time and energy pursuing things that are not aligned with who we really are and what we are capable of achieving. When we understand the misalignments between what we do naturally and what is required for success, we can close the design gap of where we want to be instead of attempting to change who we are.
When we reach out to others, who help us get to where we want to be, we increase our ability to be resourceful, to persist and be generative using our designed plan for happiness and success. We build resilience and adaptability through receiving and acting upon the feedback received from those who help us as we move along the path of constant change which is the new normal.
@F-L-O-Wis the guide we need to ride the waves of change while enjoying the happiness and well being we seek.
