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Month: April 2015 (Page 1 of 2)

The hard truth about soft skills

30/04/2015 /

54 lessons organized in 8 chapters, each of them covering an aspect where soft skills play an important role: career management, getting the job done, communication, handling critics, office politics, self-promotion, dealing with differences and leadership.

In her book “The hard truth about soft skills – workplace lessons smart people wish they’d learned sooner“, Peggy Klaus, tells us about the importance of soft skills on workplace, trying to understand why they are still so often ignored, although they are fundemental in our everyday work. The problem is semantic? What is soft cannot be considered serious? The matter is that most of us think that they are about touchy-feely people skills?

Among the 54 lessons pinted out by Klaus on the basis of her work experience:

hardtruthcover1. Knowing yourself is as important as knowing how to do your job
2. Learn when to stick and when to shift or the details will hang you
3. Know where to draw the line between self-improvement and self-destruction
4. When it comes to gossip, learn the art of deflection
5. Don’t take it personally
6. Your procrastination is trying to tell you something
7. Keep your visibility when you are not face-to-face

 

(How to) Sleep, don’t weep

23/04/2015 /

Improving your own bedtime routines can be an easy way to feel better day by day and to become a more successful and positive person. According to Jacquelyn Smith, Careers Editor for Business Insider, there are nine things successful people do before going to sleep:

  1. They read;
  2. They make a to-do list;
  3. They spend time with family;
  4. They reflect on the day;
  5. They meditate;
  6. They plan out sleep;
  7. They unplug and disconnect from work;
  8. They lie down on a positive note;
  9. They picture tomorrow’s success.

Read the full article here.

Sleep, don't weep

Image source: Flickr – Guilherme Tavares (CC BY 2.0)

How to communicate change?

21/04/2015 /

Being able to change is a crucial skill for any leader.

However, to communicate change to our colleagues or coworkers is not always easy. Scott E. Rupp provides us with 5 useful tactics that can be summarized as “inform, share, involve and be crystal clear”:

1. Provide regular, weekly e-mail blasts from leadership describing the changing events;

2. Let employees know when major decisions are expected to be made;

3. Encourage dialogue between managers and their teams;

4. Create a channel for two-way, open communication.

5. If there is no information available or something hasn’t been decided yet, let employees know that, but don’t keep them guessing. 

Read the full article here

Change

Image source: Flickr – jordi.martorell (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)

5 tips for novice public speakers

16/04/2015 /

Dananjaya Hettiarachchi, the winner of the World Championship of Public Speaking 2014 organized by Toastmaster International, interviewed by Richard Feloni for The Business Insider Australia, suggests 5 tips for novice public speakers.

Tip 1: Always start with a message. A common mistake is to start with a topic, instead a speech should begin with a message, as concise as possible. This message is whatever you want your audience to be thinking about when your presentations concludes.

Tip 2: Be confident enough to yourself. You need to sell yourself before to sell your message, the way to do that is to be genuine. A speech should be conversational, not theatrical. The only way to go in front of an audience and to present in a way that isn’t simply miming is to practice again and again, pretending (if need be) that you’re talking to a room full of your closest friends.

Tip 3: See yourself through your audience’s eyes. Speakers tend to become wrapped up in themselves, which may just be because they’re afraid to acknowledge a room full of listeners. But if you’re going to speak, you need to realise that you’re doing it for the benefit of others, not yourself.

Tip 4: Have a forum to practice. Eighty per cent of the path to becoming a great speaker is trial and error and the only way to learn is by speaking in front of an audience that will give honest feedback.

Tip 5: Find the right coach or mentor. You should find someone willing to help you grow as a public speaker. This does not need to be someone who can teach you advanced speaking techniques; they just need to be someone who gives you permission to explore possibilities, who gives you permission to fail.

Read here the full article

Speech

Image: flickr – Brian Talbot – (CC BY – NC 2.0)

 

Little changes for a big change

14/04/2015 /

What if someone told you to floss only one tooth everyday? Or start the new year, not with grand resolutions, but with a simple challenge? In this TEDx BJ Fogg shows us that the best way to achieve lasting change is to think very very small rather than planning monumental changes.

JB Fogg directs research and design at the Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, where they focus on methods to change habits. His life is devoted half to university and half to industry innovation. Up to him, his expertise is creating systems to change human behavior and he call this “Behavior design”.

<iframe src=”http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Forget-big-change-start-with-a/player?layout=&read_more=1″ width=”416″ height=”296″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”>

 

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