Thank God It's Monday!® Blog

Get Your Mojo Back! Make the Crucial Decision to Engage

I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. I didn’t love them all the same, and I didn’t love them all completely. But I loved them all.

Loving your job is a DECISION. Some jobs were a better fit with my skills and values, but regardless of where I was, I always found things to celebrate and be joyful about. It starts with feeling gratitude for having a job at all—something we tend to forget more and more as the time increases since we didn’t have one. Then you go from there.

Now a big part of my job is recommending that others do the same.

It’s like a marriage. Anyone who has been married more than a day knows that there are delightful, wonderful things about your spouse—as well as a few areas for improvement. (Look in the mirror and realize that your spouse can say the same.) So where do you put your focus? When we focus on the positives, the delightfuls and the wonderfuls, our marriage works much, much better.

If on the other hand we focus on all of those things that aren’t so hot, we’ll start accumulating baggage, bit by bit, until the marriage is crushed under the weight of it. Happens all the time.

The same is true for the marriage of employee and employer. No employer ever hires the perfect human being—but how would you like it if your employer chose to focus relentlessly on your imperfections? Likewise, an employee marinating in grievances about the employer will make him or herself miserable—a misery that spreads quickly to everyone around.

Roxanne Emmerich

Hit the Books!

Woody Allen has a great line about relationships in the movie Annie Hall. “A relationship is like a shark,” he says to Annie. “It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.”

It’s the same with your career. Sit still, stop growing, and your career will end up on life support.

You don’t have to go back to school—heck, maybe you just got OUT of school. But you DO have to master your job, and that’s an ongoing task. So it’s time to hit the books again.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes the 10,000-Hour Rule. To truly master any significant, complex skill requires 10,000 hours of dedicated practice and study. Writing, drawing, playing the cello, dancing, chess, golf—whatever it is, true mastery seems to kick in around the time you finish your 10,000th hour at the forge.

“But Mozart was writing symphonies at age six!” you say. That’s true—and his mommy probably loved them. But as neat a trick as that was, nobody plays his kindergarten symphonies today, because they didn’t represent the real mastery he eventually achieved. They were part of the 10,000 hours that led him later, much later, to write some of the most sublime musical works of all time.

Think of your career as a set of complex skills that you intend to master. You’ll reach 10,000 hours after five years on the job. But these can’t just be 10,000 hours marking time, watching the clock, getting the job done. You have to fill those hours with thinking, learning, stretching your abilities—and getting better all the time. Continue Reading »

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Let’s Get It Started!

There’s a song I love to play over the loudspeakers at my Marketing and Sales Management Boot Camp™ events. The song is “Let’s Get it Started” by the Black-Eyed Peas, and we use it to call everybody back from break, to pump them up and get them ready to GET IT STARTED again!

We could use just about any high-energy song to get people’s attention, but this one has something special, and it’s right there in the title––Let’s get it started. It doesn’t say, “Let’s hope somebody else gets it started.” It’s about US, you and me, getting started and making things happen.

Maybe you’re playing a waiting game in your company, waiting for management to get the memo and start making a positive culture change happen. You’ve filled out enough suggestion cards to fill the old card catalog at the New York Public Library. Maybe you’ve even dropped a few heavy hints in person. Nothing. Ever. Happens.

Time to stop waiting. It’s time to get it started!

Make Yourself Even More Useful

Useful is as Useful Does

By just about any measure, you’re doing well—happy in your work, your colleagues, your compensation. But you’re ready for a new challenge. After years in the same position, it’s getting harder to find motivation and interest on a daily basis. You don’t want out—you want UP. But how to get there?

You’ve tried hinting. You’ve tried flattery. You’ve even tried waving your hand in the air every time one of the bosses asks for a volunteer, and still you’re marking time in the same position.

The key is to start creating and seizing your OWN opportunities.

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Take out the Head Trash by Changing the Game

You’ve been there—we all have. Everything is going incredibly well, you’ve got the world by the tail, then suddenly… you’re tumbling through the sky.

Sometimes you feel like you just won’t ALLOW yourself to succeed. You get sick, you miss a deadline, then another. Just days after everything was going right, it seems that nothing ever will again.

If this has ever happened to you, welcome to the human race. But even if it’s common, it ain’t good. This plight is as disastrous to the success of a salesperson as the lack of skills. For experienced salespeople, it is usually the biggest part of the problem.

Striving for success feels natural, familiar. But once you reach it, even in a small way, there’s a feeling of vulnerability. You look down and your head begins spinning. That hateful little voice inside your head says, “Who do you think you are, climbing so high?” Continue Reading »