Like the Rolling Stones once said, sometimes you just can’t get no satisfaction.  No matter what that song is actually about, feeling satisfied in what you are doing in work and just life is an important thing. Some people have a lot of willpower and can spend an entire 40 year career doing something that doesn’t give them the slightest bit of satisfaction, but I am not one of those people and you don’t have to be either.

It Has a Lot To Do With Your Attitude

How you approach your work is one of the biggest factors in feeling satisfied. The Mayo Clinic says, “If you’ve gone sour on your job, think about what motivates and inspires you — and how you approach your work.” Do you treat your job as a job that you need to do to make money, a career where you look forward to advancement and more responsibility and reward in the future, or a calling, where you feel that what you are doing is what you were made to do. These three different ways of approaching your work can be the difference between feel good and feeling worn down.

I personally have days where I feel each of these and days where I feel all three in the same day. The important thing is which one is there the majority of the time. If you are just working a job, then either you need to find something else to do or change you attitude to match what you want.

Talent and Purpose

A few years ago Laura Garnett (@garnettl) wrote an article for Inc. Magazine titled “The 3-Step Guide to Loving Your Job–Any Job“. One of the main points that she makes in that article is that to feel satisfied you need to feel like you are utilizing both your talent and purpose. Your talent being what you are good at and your purpose being what give you fulfillment, it can be a tall order to use both of those in any job that you are in. She says, “You need to first know this about yourself, then value these things and know how to use them day to day in your working life.”

I have tried to take a few minutes on several occasions to think about what I’m actually good ad. Try to categorize these things and I actually made a list of them. Then I thought about what gives me fulfillment and made a list of those things. Using both lists I tried to go through what I do on a normal day and utilize as many of the things on that list as I could. Predictably, I have felt better about my job and overall more satisfied when I go home.

If You Aren’t Satisfied, Change It

One thing that I think anyone can do is change. If we aren’t changing we aren’t progressing as people. I’m not saying that you have to quit your job if you’re not feeling satisfied. Not only can you change your job if you so choose, but more importantly you can change yourself.

Change your attitude, change the way you are looking at things. Change the way you do things. Using your talents and purpose you can make any job more bearable and more satisfying. A change in attitude can go a long way to making a seemingly bad job a lot more bearable and even enjoyable if you haven’t looked at it in the right way yet.

How to Get Rid of Negativity in the Office

It never seems to fail, there is always at least one person (sometimes many) that just has to be a Debbie Downer. For a manager or owner negativity can be a very frustrating part of your daily life. It might seem like there is nothing you can do. You don’t necessarily want to fire a person who is negative, they can be very productive and vital people to your success. How can you get them to be a little more positive and help build up the positivity of other employees around them? There are a few ways.

Keep Things Positive Around Them

This may seem like a no-brainer, but when you are around someone negative, many people tend to pile on with the negativity. I have done this many times and it is really easy to join in the bashing of customers or the policies of the company or even the general status of the economy. The question is, does this bashing help? While it is good to blow off some steam once in a while, it can be very easy to keep doing that and before you know it, everyone is just looking at the negative and you all just stop trying.

It is important to try and make an effort to be positive every time you are around the negative person. This will help counteract their negativity on other people in the office and may even rub off on them and get people looking at the plus side.

Talk to Them About Being More Encouraging

There is no need to just beat around the bush, sometimes the most effective thing to do is to call them out on it. Keep in mind that some people don’t respond well to this, but some do. Be direct in telling them that they are being negative around everyone and it hurts morale and productivity. Ask them to be more vigilant in looking at the positive things that are going on and turning negative happenings into positive learning moments. There is a positive side to everything and they can find it more often if they just try.

Share Positive Things With Them

Lastly, some people are negative because they only see that side of the coin. As a manager or owner you can share some positive things about their sphere of influence in the company (within your privacy rules of course). If you can show them the light they may be able to come out of the dark alley of negativity and share that positive attitude with everyone else. I have worked in many places where there was so much talk going on simply because the higher-ups didn’t share enough information for employees to have a clear picture of exactly how well they were doing and how the company was doing. They may have a false image of how bad things are, or how good things are. There is no reason to sugar coat things too much. Transparency and be a great motivator and make it easier for people to understand how their job is contributing to everything else that is going on in the company.

While 2016 is already in full swing, it is not too late to take stock of last year and make some goals for the coming year. It really doesn’t matter when you do an annual review, the calendar year is simply an easy place to start. So, don’t think that you can only do a review at the beginning or end of the year, just think of the next 12 months and go for it.

Why do we do annual reviews?

In business there normally an annual review period where you take stock of where you are and where you want to be going in the next year. Employee reviews can be a time to consider promotions, raises and bonuses. You can do this for yourself in your own personal life as well. The purpose here is to remind you of your successes in the past year, whatever they are, and learn from your mistakes to make them into successes this year.

The Good

First, think of all the good things that happened this year. No matter how small. You overcame a challenge, an illness, got to spend some time with family, took a great trip with loved ones, or you just had a particularly good day at some point. Everyone should be able to come up with at least 10 things here.

Don’t discount small things, from small and simple things great things come to pass. Your small successes add up to a great amount of good that has happened to you this past year. Don’t overlook it.

The Bad

While I am not normally one to dwell on the bad things of life, here it is good to take stock of some of the things that went badly. Here it is often good to list about 3-5 things. We will be using this list in a minute and we don’t want it to be too long for these purposes. I like to think of it as picking the top 5 worst things that happened to me this year.

Keep it Real

The last thing to do in this exercise is to consider both the good and the bad and decide things like: What was my greatest achievement this year? What was my biggest failure? What was my biggest risk taken? What do I want to do more this year? What do I want to do less? What are my biggest goals for this year? Why do I want to accomplish those things? How am I going to accomplish my goals? Why didn’t I accomplish some of my goals last year? What do I want my average day to look like this year?

All of these are good questions to ask yourself and review from time to time throughout the year. Use your journal, blog posts or old pictures on your phone to help you come up with your answers.

Here’s some Help

I put together a real quick worksheet for you to use to answer all of these questions on paper if you want to. There is some benefit to writing things out and these kinds of goals it could be very good to slow down and really answer them truthfully, it’s only for you, so you are only lying to yourself.

Download Worksheet Here

Hope you have a great year and please share this post with your friends and subscribe here on this page.

And stay positive!

A Positive Attitude will Help You Climb Higher

There is something about being the person at the bottom of the ladder that can make people do strange things. I have heard all kinds of advice on what you should do to make yourself more noticeable and valuable to your company and by doing that, make your job more secure. Some of the advice is good, but ultimately there is really no such thing as total job security. If the bottom line says that a company needs to have layoffs, there will be layoffs. There is nothing that you can do about it really. What you should do is keep a positive outlook and try to make yourself stand out to your bosses so that you can further your career and take on new challenges and responsibilities.

Positivity is the Key to Standing Out

Keeping a positive outlook isn’t easy. I try to look at the bright side of everything that I can, but things still get to me, people still annoy me and some day I am down-right cranky. However, if you make a concerted effort to be positive and look for the good in people and situations it will become easier to maintain that attitude. This is good for both your co-workers and yourself. Your own well-being can be improved by being more positive.

Outside just improving your own mental and emotional health, you are affecting the people around you. If you become a force for positivity in your company, then others will want to be around you. They will want to work with you on projects. Your superiors will see that and recognize that having a person like that around improves everyone’s work ethic and moral. If you are a supervisor you know that if everyone on your team is negative about something it will never get done. Or at least it won’t be done well. The positive force stands out and pulls the whole upward.

Don’t Let The Debbie-Downers of the Office Get to You

If you remember anything from physics (which I barely do) you should remember Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you are a positive force in your company there is inevitably be someone who is a negative force. There is really no way to get rid of these people, they exist in some form in every company I have ever worked for.

Don’t let these people ruin what you are trying to do. They will always try to look at the worst possible outcome, the worst effect of a new system or policy and the worst things about you in particular. Don’t listen to the negative stuff. You know most of it already, and you are choosing to move past it and make the best of things.  Also, don’t stoop to being negative back toward them. This is what I like to call the politicians trap. When one person is negative, it is the natural reaction for the opposing person to be negative right back. We must fight this urge and stay positive, it will be better in the long run. Negativity only brings more negativity.

It’ll be Okay, Really

Lastly, remember that everything will be okay. If you have a setback, it’ll be okay. If you don’t make your goal, it’ll be okay. If your idea isn’t chosen by your boss, it’ll be okay. Life is a continuum. It keeps going and when you stay positive and keep giving you best you will not only stand out, but you will feel better at each point along the way. You can’t only dream about the future. You need to be happy with where you are and who you are right now while working on bigger and better things for the future. A positive attitude will give you a leg up in business and in life.

I have been working a lot lately on solving problems. At the beginning of the year there is often a lot of planning and goal-setting and hoping for what will be a great year if all of our plans and goals come to be.

The only thing is there always seems to be problems that get in the way of our goals and plans. Don’t think that you are unique in this, I have seen it at every company I have worked at and every client I have done work for. Everyone has problems. What you need is to find solutions to your problems.

Of course, that is much easier said than done in most cases. Solutions come in many different forms. You may find a software program that does the task that you need done. You may find someone in your organization with a skill that is useful in solving your problem. You may change the way you handle something so that the problem is no longer a problem. Any of these can resolve your problem, if you take a few minutes to go through 3 steps.

Step 1: Describe your worst problem.

Describing the problem seems like it is easy, but I know from experience that is not always the case. Describing a problem in a single phrase or sentence can be very hard to pin down. Ultimately you can do it though. If people aren’t getting the follow-up they expect when they call your company with a concern, your problem is either poor recording and tracking of issues, poor follow-up by customer account reps, or your employees simply don’t know where to send these concerns. Describing the problem as simply as possible will help you find a solution.

Step 2: What is your desired outcome?

Now, in the same single phrase/sentence style, describe what should be the outcome of this problem. This is your goal, what people expect. If you expect your employees to better handle customer complaints and resolve issues in a single phone call, say it. If you want your account reps to know enough about your product or service to answer more questions right away, that’s you goal. This tells you where you are headed.

Step 3: Find more than one possible solution.

Now you need to bring your problem and your outcome together, but don’t stop with the first solution you think of. Come up with several solutions, at least two or three. Then you can look at the solutions and decide which one will fit your need, your budget and ultimately your goal. If you only have resources for a cheap solution, go for it. There is no shame in having to fix something simply. If your organization is larger this become more difficult, but having options will keep you from going for a complex solution when a simple one will do, or from picking a simple solution when a more complex one may be a better fix in the long term.

Each of these steps is a very basic overview, solving problems inside organizations can take a while and much more detail, but these same steps are going to be effective.

If you have just a moment, take this quick, one question survey and let me know what your worst problem is right now, everything is anonymous and I hope to use the data for a future post. http://goo.gl/forms/i1dhYkpCrE

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Companies big and small need to keep track of their customers. What products or services are they buying? What is their history with your company? When has someone from your company made contact with them? What kinds of offers have you sent them? All of these things should be tracked, and indeed there are many software companies devoted to tracking all kinds of information to help business owners track their customers. Why then do so many companies seem to have a right hand that doesn’t know what the left hand is doing? The answer is lack of planning.

This morning I read an excellent articles on Forbes.com by Kasia Moreno titled “Why Do Companies Undervalue Customer Loyalty?” She pointed to an experience with a major magazine where they sent her both a renewal offer as an existing customer and an offer as if she had never subscribed. Not only is it poor business for them to not even know who their customers are, but they rubbed it in by offering a better deal to the new customer than the existing one! This seems so backwards by all accounts. When it comes to communicating with customers we should know who our existing customers are and who are future customers.

Communicating with Customers, Old and New

Anyone who has been in business for very long will tell you that it is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than go out and find a new one. Keeping customers happy will keep them coming back, which is especially true to service or subscription based business models. You should be offering the best deals to your loyal customers. While you may have introductory offers for new customers, don’t underestimate the value of a longtime, loyal customer.

I am well aware of the problems that arise from not having a software package that can do everything you really want with your customer database. For small to medium sized businesses you must fit into the template of whatever software program you use. For larger businesses there is no reason they cannot develop a system for all their different divisions to use to track customers at all levels. You should not be wasting money sending new offers to existing customers.

While these things are easy to say in a blog post, I know that they can be difficult to actually implement. What processes or tools are out there to help keep track of customers and get rid of these kinds of situations?

For each generation there is a day that really defines it. It is date that everyone who was old enough to know what was happening can remember where they were. For my grandparents’ generation it was December 7, 1941. For my parents’ generation it was probably July 20, 1969. For my generation it is most definitely September 11, 2001.

Everyone has their story, I remember it well and I also have a lot of notes from that day that I took and have kept now for 13 years. It was my Senior year of high school and I had the opportunity to report on it on our school’s daily announcement broadcast, where I was the newsroom reporter. It was a great experience, one of the few pieces of “hard news” that I reported on and it changed the way I looked at life and the world.

Now, 13 years on, I am now a husband and father. I spent two years living abroad and experienced other cultures and ways of life. I have seen how my peers’ lives have been shaped by this event and those things that followed because of it. On this day each year we have a sort of reverence for the day and post messages remembering where we were and those who lost their lives. It is a universal point of reference for Millennial Americans.

When someone says “Nine-Eleven” I know exactly what they are referring to and I like hearing others’ experiences from that day. It is not to say that other generation don’t have the same reaction to it, but for Millennials it is the first, and really the only, date that defines the times that we live in. It has really changed many things, either directly or indirectly.

We are either witnesses of history or participants of it. The wars, the economic recession and everything else that has happened in the last 13 years is called the “post 9-11 world.” That world is more and more being shaped by those who were just coming of age in 2001. Is the world better or worse than it was before? How are we working to make that world better?

It seems as though in business we spend a lot of time looking for the next big thing. One that is too often overlooked is the value of good customer service. Customer service will make or break a business in the long term. To be successful at it, you need to consider 3 things: company culture, employee training, and measurability.

Company Culture

This seems like the easiest part of it, but really it is the hardest to implement and the most important to do well. When everyone at a company is on the same page, the service and response your customers receive will be the same whether they interact with a customer service rep over the phone, a sales rep in the field, or a truck driver delivering product.

You do you build culture? It’s easier said than done, you need to make sure that every level of the customer understands what kind of experience your customers should have.

“You have to be no less than a customer concierge, doing everything you can to make every one of your customers feel acknowledged, appreciated, and heard. You have to make them feel special, just like when your great-grandmother walked into Butcher Bob’s shop or bought her new hat, and you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were.”

– Gary Vaynerchuk, “The Thank You Economy”

Employee Training

Even the most seasoned employee needs to have updated training periodically to remind them of best practices, new information and reinforced policies. We can all use time to review situations and take the time to come up with the best responses to those situations so that when the time arises we are not on-the-spot making it up.

I recently heard half of a phone conversation one of the customer service reps in my office was having with a particularly difficult customer. As the call progressed emotions got high and it became more and more difficult for  the rep to successfully conclude this call with the customer being happy. While I think the rep handled the call professionally as as good as could be expected, there were things to learn in it.

Several people in the office reviewed the call afterwards and we used the time to reinforce things like avoiding trigger words that make customers defensive or emotional. Constant review and training, both formal and informal, will keep you on top of everything.

Measurability

Coming up with metrics that make sense for your situation and business is important to know if your efforts are making any difference. Are you retaining more customers? Is talk about you on social media more positive? Are your existing customers spending more money with you? Whatever the metric is, find a way to measure it regularly over time and keep at it. If you don’t measure you don’t know.

The first time that I tried to start graduate school I failed miserably. The coursework was taking so long, I couldn’t find enough time to figure out what I was supposed to be getting from the theorists I was reading about. My life was rather hectic at the time and I ultimately decided to pull out of school for the time being. That was a great decision.

There are so many things that pull for my time. I have work responsibilities. I have family obligations (and a general desire to spend more time with my family). I volunteer as a Boy Scout leader every week. I teach at my church one Sunday a month and I now have again attempted to add graduate level classwork to that mix. With so many things vying for my time, why would I want to add something else? The answer is prioritizing.

Take Control

Steven Covey put it well.

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

When you decide to take control of your time you will find that you make so much more of it than if you let yourself be acted upon. There are some times and place where you cannot help it, but actively taking control will make you a much more productive and happy person.

Make Time

Time is a lot like steel, you won’t find it laying around, you have to make it. Working to make time can be tiring in and of itself. I am an easily distracted person, I like to procrastinate. I can spend hours reading articles on the internet if I let myself. Self discipline is something that I am still working on and I hope to get even better so that I can better manage my time and become a more productive person because of it.

Anyone who had turned on a TV this month has probably seen one of the seemingly endless versions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” There is everything from “A Diva’s Christmas Carol” to “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” I for one don’t really care for novelty interpretations of Dickens’ work, I prefer the classics, original and Muppet.

The story was written and originally published for the Christmas of 1843. That means that the story was not originally a “period piece” as it is today, but actually set in the modern day at the time. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but the world looks a bit different than it did in 1843, and those differences can change the message that “A Christmas Carol” delivers.

The most misunderstood word in the story is “humbug.” When Scrooge exclaims, “Bah! Humbug!” he is not just making an exasperated exclamation, he is commenting on what he perceives as the motivation behind others’ Christmas spirit.

“Humbug” describes a person who is incenser, deceiving or otherwise dishonest in their outward appearance or actions. Scrooge isn’t just an old miser who hates happiness and everything that brings it, he thinks that others are only putting up a face of generosity. He knows that he is stingy, but feels at least he is honest about it.

The real change that Scrooge goes through is that he goes from being cynical about Christmas (and everything for that matter) to realizing that there are those who have want, yet still keep the spirit of Christmas (Bob Cratchet), and those who have no good reason to be kind and giving to someone, yet still are because that is the kind of person they are (Fred, his nephew).

So, this Christmas take a look and see if you really keep Christmas in your heart, or are you just going through the motions. Don’t be a humbug.