Does fear paralyze you from achieving your goals? Does it stop you in your tracks and make you reconsider what you are doing?
This is especially true for women who are involved in starting up businesses.
Learn tips and tricks to overcome your fear and embrace your power from Shannon Muruli. Shannon created the Fire Her Personal Power Program as well as the DoItAfraid Challenge and the School of Courage. She works with a number of women to help them conquer their fears and achieve their goals.
TECHNICAL NOTE: We use a video meeting and webinar service called ZOOM to bring you – live! – into our weekly talkshow via audio, video and/or chat. To participate you’ll need to download a small applet to your PC. The downloaded app only takes a few seconds to load and is secure. Learn more about Zoom’s security features.
Interested in taking these concepts deeper? Check out our free coaching resources!” and make free coaching resources!
FREE PDF Guide to Women in Leadership
Executive Coach Dana Theus shares her tried and true strategies to help women excel in higher levels of leadership and achieve their executive potential.
Over the past few months I’ve been hearing from clients and friends who struggle with a vague sense of dissatisfaction in their lives and careers.
In most cases it’s not too tough to ferret out the source of work-life dissatisfaction; we scan our lives and find that we’re happy in life, but we hate our jobs – or vice versa. But not always. When the dissatisfaction feels less clear, it can mean that we like all the individual things we’re choosing to spend our time and energy on, but overall are still left feeling tired, stretched and stressed. As one of my clients put it:
The life of an entrepreneur can be thrilling. The rush of a big partnership or client win. An award acknowledging hard work. The freedom to make the choices you think are right. Building a business from a thought sketched on a napkin into a revenue generating company.
At the same time, it can be very lonely.
… you often cannot really talk honestly about your business even to your wife, lover, or significant other. They truly cannot understand the unique frisson of terror that many of us wake to every day as we rise to try to methodically slay our individual business dragons.
Any entrepreneur can relate. It’s difficult to share your entrepreneur story because you don’t think anyone will understand it. And most likely – they won’t.
We all sometimes get stuck in our careers – get a little complacent, sometimes stuck, sometimes we just don’t see a different way to get what we want. Or from a different perspective, we simply forget what we want.
For this discussion, Mary Schaefer will be joining us again to discuss how to set a career intention for the coming year. We’ll be talking about what goes into a career intention, why it’s important, why we all need to reconsider and refresh our views, and how do we make it happen.
Need help setting your career intention? Check out our Career Center for tools and advice!
Stress can be a powerful and healthy resource. Yes, you heard me correctly – a resource. But wait, stress is bad, stress causes health problems, we all should try to diminish the stress in our daily lives… right? Not exactly. Sure, chronic stress can absolutely be harmful to health and well-being. But not always. When stress is viewed as a resource that is helpful to our lives, it can instead have many surprising and healthy benefits.
How Can Stress Be A Resource?
In everyday use being “stressed” has come to refer to a mind-boggling array of life experiences. Daily pressures like a job, school, caring for a child, juggling family schedules, building a business, and performing under pressure are all labeled “stressful.” But so are financial pressures, health problems, and traumatic loss. Undoubtedly eliminating some of these “stressful” difficulties from our lives would be ideal. But here is the thing: wouldn’t you miss many of these challenges? Think about it. Struggle and stress often go hand in hand with the experiences, people, and things you care about the most. (more…)
Meeting early at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington DC, we were strategists behind an international organization representing 160 of the biggest companies and Non Governmental Organization (NGO) nonprofits in the world. The Director, on a trip over from his home base in Switzerland to meet with the Chairman of his Board and two experienced consultants, had a most respected European academic institutions funding his effort and he personally exhibited more brain cells than the rest of the room put together.
The four of us discussed the big question for this organization, the issue of how to launch their organization to the global community – accommodating the various interests of their members in the process.
As we talked and explored the strategies of organizational change, I was struck by how this powerful group danced around the edge of powerlessness. The Director and his Chairman – a woman with decades of experience and deep knowledge of the politics and economics of this field – listed on their website some of the most recognized and powerful brands in the world as paying members. And yet, our discussion revolved around the “tyranny of minorities,” two groups whose divergent positions threatened to stalemate the organization – either diluting or halting the launch. (more…)
Everyone wants to change. The airwaves are full of tempting enticements to cause change in our bodies, our minds and our relationships, but the real process of change is so much more organic and subtle than a pill or piece of exercise equipment can deliver.
When I was a little kid I was afraid of a lot of things. But for two summers when I was about 7-8 my parents sent me to sleep-away camp and I learned a valuable lesson: my Stretch Zone was an ok place to be. I did things I wouldn’t have done before. I survived home sickness. I made new friends. I found some beauty in the world I hadn’t known existed. I learned how to ride a donkey.
We all want a map, some instructions, maybe a blueprint for how to change when we buy that bright new shiny widget. I don’t now about you, but I have a pile of books (i.e., maps) and a bag for Good Will (i.e., formerly shiny objects) ready to give away at this point. But I think I need to send myself back to Summer Camp instead of buying another bright shiny widget.
Why was sleep-away camp more effective than the books and the widgets? What’s going on when real, sustainable, change is in the works? (more…)
As a rule, women are good communicators. Yet many women are told that their communications patterns are holding them back when it comes to workplace success. What’s going on here?
For starters, the above observation is full of generalizations. “All women” aren’t “good” at stuff any more than “all men” are “bad” at stuff. Everyone’s individual strengths and challenges are much more important than any generalized trend, however certain patterns are universal enough to warrant some examination. The pattern I want to take aim at today is one that I used to fall victim to myself, and it’s an example of how a woman’s strengths can become weaknesses through no fault of their own. Thankfully, there are also some pretty simple communication tips that will help you overcome this double-bind if you struggle with this common pattern.
An undervalued strength many women bring to the workplace is their ability to see consequences in the future very clearly. Women are able to predict cause and effect—particularly when it requires understanding human reactions to things—and conduct an intuitive risk assessment very quickly. This means that they’re really good at poking holes in plans and strategies to identify the plan’s weaknesses.
I bet you can see how this strength gets turned into a weakness very quickly:
Yes, many organizations and governments are oppressive and need to be voted and fought against. But true freedom of choice is a state of mind.
How can you tell? In any community, regardless of circumstance, you can find people who bear the burden of the rules around them differently. There are those who rail against limitations by putting limitations on others. Those who squander the freedoms they have by lamenting the freedoms they don’t. And some who simply give up.
If you’re “happily enough employed”, can you really be in a job search? Yes! In the career development world we call this a “passive job search” and it’s been shown that people who are happy where they are usually get the best job offers to go somewhere else and they’ll be even happier! To the recruiter community, currently employed job seekers who are willing to look at alternative career options are called “passive job seekers” and they are prizes to be won. Why? Because it’s assumed that someone who already has a job they like won’t come with the baggage of sour grapes or questionable skills that may accompany those actively looking.
Is the assumption that if you’re actively looking there may be something wrong with you fair? No. But think of it like this: when you’re engaging in a passive job search, you’re playing a little hard to get, so if they want you they have to try a bit harder. The benefits? Better opportunities, higher salary, greater benefits.
Jonathan was three years into his first management job at a biotech company, leading a small delivery team, when he was contacted on LinkedIn about a position at an even bigger company. He liked where he was but recognized that the promotion opportunities were pretty slim. The new company had a bigger organization, more labs and specialties to help him refine his skills, work on more market-facing projects and move up the ladder. They offered him $12,000 more a year than he was currently making and a moving allowance to relocate to a city closer to his wife’s parents. He was sad to leave his current position, but recognized that opening up a slot for one of the promising employees on his team was a win-win. Jonathan played the game right and got the benefit.
What did Jonathan do to be proactive in his passive job search?
