Category Archives: Personal Growth

How to improve your confidence, have better relationships, make a difference, matter, be happy, liked, respected, and resilient. Learn to manage your emotions and moods.

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Why Now? The Urgent Need for Healthcare Companies to Keep Up, Attract, Retain and Engage Employees

“I skate to where the puck is going.”
~ Hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky’s response to “Why are you so successful?”

Urgent Need for Healthcare Companies to Keep Up, Attract, Retain and Engage Employees

ACT - Action changes Things

For your company to be successful in this highly competitive industry, leaders need to inspire full engagement among employees.

Gallup reports: “With change permeating healthcare organizations, optimizing employee performance is more important than ever -- for both patient outcomes and organizational effectiveness.


It's alarming, then, that just one in five U.S. employees strongly agree their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.”

Millennials Already Considering Job Hopping

Sixty percent of Millennials, soon to be the biggest part of the workforce, are currently looking for a new job opportunity that will satisfy their needs.

Millennials are looking for something special in their work.

In the words of Gallup’s article “Why Healthcare Leaders Should Build a Culture of Development” “Millennial employees . . . are looking for a coach, not just a boss. They want ongoing feedback, a rich sense of purpose, and continuous personal and professional development -- starting now.”

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Coaching for Healthcare Employees Part 1 – Underperforming Employees Reflect On Leadership

Underperforming Employees Reflect on Senior Leadership

reclining man showing underperformance at work

When employees underperform, top leadership assumes those who lead them are the problem. Are your employees performing as well as they could be?

One of the biggest reasons coaching for your employees is such a great idea is that sometimes your team needs a quick and dramatic course correction.

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Optimism is for Amateurs

5 Ways Pros Manage Their Emotions and Succeed

Smiley faces for Optimism is for Amateurs, 5 Ways Pros Manage Their Emotions and Succeed
Einstein played poker like a pro.

His career in theoretical physics taught him that winning is in the long game.​

While amateurs think their goal is so exciting and ideal that nothing can stop it from happening exactly as they wish, pros see it differently.

They know that there will always be challenges along the way, and that no idea goes from inception to execution without finding out what doesn’t work.

Pros learn early how to manage their emotions and end up succeeding much more often than others who tend to get discouraged and quit the minute the going gets tough.

Let’s look at five ways pros manage their emotions and succeed with these five actions.

Professionals:

1. Practice realistic optimism

2. Embrace the hard work paradox

3. Conduct “pre-mortems”

4. Apply growth mindset

5. Prepare for personal shortcomings

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Focus Fast: 5 Steps to Capture and Keep Concentration

Quick formula to motivate and focus

magnifying glass with arrows for focus fast for concentration

“Everybody talks about the weather. Nobody does anything about it.”       ~Charles Dudley Warner*

You could say the same about focus.

Sure, you know you need to concentrate, but has anyone ever given you the formula for how to do it?

If you’re still wrestling with willpower, trying to strong arm your way into focus, you can let go of the struggle.

As long as you’re willing to follow these steps, you WILL develop the ability to get focused fast and to keep your concentration, even in times of change and chaos.

Preview: Here ​are your 5 Steps to Focus Fast
1. Make it meaningful
2. Take tiny steps
3. Let (eu)stress happen
4. Give yourself a break
5. Pick up on patterns

Let’s kick it off with your first step to focus fast.

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Less Stress with 5 Easy Task and Time Management Tips

How to Manage Your Time Better Fast!

Picture on reality check to manage your time quickly

ONE for a reason

Do you have way too many priorities? Time to rethink what that word means.

When the word priority first came into the English language in the 1400’s, it was a singular word. As in ONE priority. It meant “the right of precedence over others.”

It stayed singular for about the next 500 years.

And then, stealthily at first, perhaps, and then all out and in your face, priorities entered our language.

We won’t even begin to dive deeply into the myth of multitasking here.

Let it be enough for now to feel validated in your opinion that you cannot, in fact multitask. You can only task switch.  And that takes tons of energy and focus and delivers little for your efforts.

Get ready to take control of your time and tasks with these five easy task and time management tips for less stress and better results to show for your efforts.

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How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything

Not Candy Colorblind

 

“Absolutely NO brown M&Ms”

You would only have seen this demand if you’d read to page 40 of rock band Van Halen’s 53-page rider. A rider is a contract between the band and the venue and lays out everything from how to set up the stage to what snacks to put backstage.

Most bands in the 80’s, Roth said, would have riders the size of pamphlets, about six pages long. Not Van Halen.

Van Halen’s showmanship, along with great music, combined to make them one of the most popular bands of the 80’s and 90’s.

A lot went into making their show stand out, and it was important that all the details from load bearing capacity of the stage to how electrical was set up to physical space around the entire show, was set up just so.

Detail after detail filled the pages of their rider. When it got to the “Munchies” section of the rider, the band wrote specifics about which meals would be served to them on which days.

And oh yes, M&M’s, of course. But clearly stated in the rider was when it came to the candy-coated chocolate, they were to have ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN M&M’s.

Roth laughed when he recalled this years later, saying that people assumed they were messing with people and being that picky because they could be. The band let people think it was all part of the mystique.

The real reason no brown M&M’s

Roth explained that because their band was doing things in their show that other bands weren’t, they had a higher need for attention to detail so that the stage and light fixtures could carry the load.

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Do You Hit Snooze?

5 Surprising Insights It Tells You About You

It’s a workday, the alarm rings. What do you do?

Shut it off, and immediately get up? Hit snooze once, twice, maybe more?

If you feel like hitting snooze, I can relate. This entry is prompted by a compelling desire I had this morning to hit the snooze. But I’m flying to Portland today to deliver a two-day seminar on “Habits of Highly Successful People.”

First, how ironic would it be if I hit snooze, given my topic?

Second, I promised myself a long time ago, I wouldn’t have the first act of a business day be procrastinating something (like getting up.)

Now let’s look into some surprising insights that hitting the snooze button may tell you about yourself.

1. Commitment phobic

You may have had grand visions for your morning. You’re going to get up early, go for a quick run, jot a card to a friend, or write down your goals.

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Stress and Time Management is Harder Because of THIS Myth

Multitasking, The Myth That Keeps on Going

The myth that causes more work and worry

 “List your strengths.” Many of my seminars on Time and Stress Management begin with this request.

Sadly, far too many people write down that they multitask well.

“Multitasking is good” (or even possible) is the myth that causes more work and worry.

You’re not actually doing two things at once at work when you believe you’re multitasking. You’re task switching. Big difference.

And the difference costs you brain power, energy and work quality.

What multitasking might look like

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Healthcare Leaders: 5 Ways to Get Focused Fast

How to get and keep your own attention

How to Capture and Keep Your Attention

In the healthcare industry, expectations are going up at the same time resources are not.

It’s more important that ever for you and those you lead to be able to use your valuable resource of attention.

Great news, you can actually train yourself to harness your attention and stay on task.

Here are five ways you can get focused fast so more of the right things get done.Start to finish

  1. Start to finish
  2. Count down
  3. Time it right
  4. Break it up
  5. Schedule it 

    1. Start to finish.

It’s important that you break up your tasks into chunks that you can start and finish during the course of the day.

As you work, think, “start to finish.” You’re work on that task isn’t done until that small piece is done. Have a bias towards action, and completion.

One of the biggest reasons you leave work feeling stressed and unsatisfied with your work, in spite of the fact

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Leaders, Guilt Can Be Good

“Can you help me get over guilt?”

asked Rita, an RN and a Remote Clinical Care Manager during our phone in coaching session. Rita continued, “I start work early, I work through lunch, I work late, and I still feel guilty. What do I do to not feel guilty?”

How easy it would be if guilt were like a light you could just switch off when you wanted to.

When I was in college, my first car was my Dad’s ’67 Volkswagen. I was happy to have a free car, because I was working full time to put myself through school, and I was happy not to have a car payment on top of college expenses.

One day, the check oil light went on in my little Bug. I had no idea what that light meant and all I could think of was “Great! Like I have the money to pay for this!”

I was telling my friends about this when one of the guys says, “You know there’s a fuse for that.”

“A what?” I said.

“A fuse,” he answered. “All you have to do is go where the fuse is and pull it, and boom! The light goes out.”

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Boost Productivity and Focus

Regain energy, power and focus with these 5 tips

Boost your focus and productivity.Want to regain energy, power and focus?

Get your mojo back and boost your productivity at the same time by applying these five tips.

Crystal Clear Pre-cap: (Spoiler alert: Bottom line up front, details follow.)

  1. Bring just enough energy and intensity to the task.
  2. Listen to your guilt, don’t just try to make it go away.
  3. Stop “throwing good money after bad.”
  4. Allow sufficient recovery. Key word: sufficient.
  5. Have realistic expectations. 

    Add your own best practices in the comments!#1. Bring just enough energy and intensity to the task.

Of course, like all responsible people, you start each workday with a short, prioritized success list. If you don’t yet do this, is now a good time to start that proven success habit

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Positive Thinking Gets a New Twist

For Positive Change, Start Here

positive thinking done rightWhen positive thinking just isn’t getting you where you want to be, it might be time boost positive results with an unexpected twist.

Research has proven that the right kind of negative thinking can actually increase your chances of getting those goals you really want.

Try WOOP for a healthy dose of realistic optimism that’s been proven time and time again to help people reach their goals, no matter how ambitious those goals may be.

W-O-O-P is a four-step process created by psychologist Gabriele Ottingen, who wrote the book “Rethinking Positive Thinking.” WOOP allows you to think through what might go wrong so you’ve got back up plans when the unexpected happens.

It works like this:

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