Tag Archives: coaching

25 tips for professionals under age 25

27 Apr 406295610_6ac305b653_z

As a big sister, I’ve had the privilege of mentoring my 10-years-younger little brother as he went through high school, college, several internships with my company, and eventually joined my company. He is now on a full-ride scholarship in grad school at Notre Dame. I couldn’t be prouder.

I’ve also worked with a number of younger professionals throughout my career, and I remember keenly being one of those young professionals—as a journalist, I was usually the youngest person in my newsroom (by far). There was so much I didn’t know, and wasn’t taught to me in college, about how to succeed in the business world.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the advice that I, at 35, would give to my 25-year-old self or other young professionals in their first few years of post-college employment. I don’t always follow this advice, but the results are infinitely better when I do. Here are 25 tips for success for young professionals under age 25:

  1. Take initiative. This is the most important thing you can do in any job, in any role—in life. Don’t wait for permission or a request, just see a need and propose a solution…better yet, start working on the solution!
  2. Dress for success. Senior professionals want to see you as an up-and-coming professional, not stuck in your college gear (and they’ll assume, your college mindset). Invest in a wardrobe that mirrors the executives (and by shopping sale racks and seconds stores like Nordstrom Rack and TJ Maxx, you can do this on your current salary). Don’t imagine “casual Friday” equals jeans and sneakers—choose better-than-casual shoes, slacks and a casual jacket to demonstrate your professionalism.
  3. Be polished. A dry cleaner and tailor will help—and don’t wear anything that is revealing, too tight/ill-fitting, or dirty/stained/torn. Iron your shirts, shine your shoes, file and polish your nails, get a good haircut. Carry a high-quality bag. Each small detail adds up. Look like the kind of person an executive would be proud to introduce to a client.
  4. Be polite. Manners count in business lunches, in thank-you notes and in small interactions. Read a book on modern manners—seriously! When flustered, keep your cool and be nicer than necessary.
  5. Polish your communications. Send emails that are properly capitalized, spelled and signed. (Don’t lower-case your name or the letter i—this reads a juvenile chat-room behavior.) Double-check documents and communications before sending—a small grammatical error or typo will make you look less smart than you really are, especially if you know better. Continue reading →

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Blowing up the garage with my chem set (and other curiosities)

7 Feb 4273225057_bcd1baf329_z

My friend has a sign in her office that has been top-of-mind for me this week: “Asking questions is a mark of success.”

Cool. So what does that mean?

Taken one way, it might mean that once you’ve risen to a point of being successful, once you’ve arrived, you now have permission to ask anything. And often this will go unchallenged—I know one tricky CEO who likes to ask stupid questions just to see if his staff is willing to challenge him! He calls it his “BS barometer.” I like that.

Taken another way, asking questions may be the pathway to success. Today, I got a call about something I’ve been preparing to do, and I asked several questions to try to be ready for a meeting about it later this week. The question I really wanted to ask:

“What do I not know now that I’m going to wish I knew six months from now?”

That is, what high-impact piece of information am I missing? And this leads me into further questions about whether the bridge to get this information is long (e.g. you must learn Russian) or short (you must learn the secret handshake).

So I started thinking of the questions I like to keep in my back pocket, the kind that automatically spring to my thirsty, curious mind.

One of the things I’ve disciplined myself to do is to compartmentalize my questions into three groups:

  • Thinking questions – These questions start with where, who, when, and how. They’re about facts that you can prove or disprove, and can measure objectively.
  • Feeling questions – These questions start with what, and they dig into experiences and personal assessments and perspectives. Don’t merely equate feeling with emotion; consider that a feeling question is a person’s subjective sense of the external world.
  • Knowing questions – These questions start with why, and they are about your core beliefs and intuition. They don’t rely on external perceptions—you know in your gut whether something is right or wrong, true or false.

I credit Shirlaws Coaching for teaching me this unique approach to questioning during a coaching skills workshop several years ago. They guide you to approach asking questions in this order, which allows a answerer to gradually move from answering from the head (logic) to the heart (feeling) to the gut (intuition).

I watched this questioning process conducted on a fellow coach and it was startling the degree biology came into play—the questioner probed with thinking, feeling and finally knowing questions, and when the answerer was done, he was just done. You could physically see the change in his body.

How do you approach questioning? Do you have a system to uncover the information you need? I find asking too many “why” questions in business up front can often put someone on the defensive, so that’s one more reason I try to use this system.

Consider testing a new product, for example. Let’s say you’d never even heard of the iPad. Here’s one way to organize your approach to learning more:

  1. Who is this for? How do you turn it on? How do you navigate? Who made it? Where can I get one? How can I use it? When do I need to charge it? When will I use it?
  2. What is this like? What is this totally unlike? What else can it do? What surprises me about this? What markets can it disrupt? What will I do with it?
  3. Why was it invented? Why aren’t there more products like this on the market? Why is it made in this shape and color? Why is it available only with X features but not Y features? Why am I reacting like this? Why do I like it? Why not?

So my question is this: how do you approach curiosity and questioning? How do you find out more about your world? I’m a kick-the-tires, take-it-for-a-test-drive kind of girl … I’ll get around to reading the driver’s manual only after getting stuck on the side of the road. My parents were smart enough not to get me a chem set or I would have surely blown up the garage. Instead, they shipped me off to courses in bubbleology and computer science (and this was 1984).

Once, a friend got mad at me—really, truly, angry—because I would not let him show me how to play a video game. I wanted to try it myself. And if I lost, well, I could start over, right?

Oh, no. In his mind, it was do-or-die, and he demanded I do it right the first time. Needless to say, we got in quite the tiff over whether it’s better to show someone the right way or let them figure it out for themselves.

You know which side I’m on.

I’m for experimentation. For mistakes. For more questions than answers. For try-it-before-you-buy-it. For fiddling around with all the knobs and levers until you’ve got things just the way you want them. For endless Control+Z do-overs until I finally, finally get it right.

That’s how I roll. How about you? GO.

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The toughest apology I’ve ever written

10 Jan Apology

This is hard for me to write. An apology to my best friend. I’ve been paralyzed by fear that it wouldn’t be enough to rescue a relationship that endured for fifteen years before suddenly, almost inexplicably, it vanished. But here, I’ll try to explain.

It was November 7, 2009, and I was planning a trip to Seattle to celebrate two friends’ birthdays. I was going to take my best friend out to lunch during her short break from work (as a retail manager, her weekends were almost always filled with work), and then go to a dinner show with another friend for her milestone 30th birthday.

But when I got on I-5 to make the three-hour drive up to the Seattle area, a pounding rain storm slowed traffic to 25 mph, and I was stuck. I knew I couldn’t make it there by her lunch break, and so I called my best friend to tell her I wouldn’t be able to make it on time. She didn’t answer (she was probably working), so I left a message. I asked if I could take her to breakfast or lunch the next day.

I didn’t hear from her. I called her again that night, and again the next day. Nothing. Continue reading →

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Networking tips (1) How picking pink can help you meet more people

12 Dec Biz networking

This week I’m unplugging, taking my family to Hawaii for ten days of swimming, napping, swimming and more napping. Bliss.

But I didn’t want to disconnect entirely, because I have been thinking lately about networking. I recently ran into one of the most successful commercial real estate brokers in Portland at my son’s preschool (turns out, his kid goes there, too), and it reminded me of how disconnected I allowed myself to become.

For the year following the birth of each of my children, I chose to retire from extracurricular activities such as professional associations and serving on committees because I felt like I didn’t have a single.extra.minute to spare.

Running into the broker reminded me of the people and relationships I missed while away, and now that my daughter is one, I’m making a conscious effort to reconnect with these colleagues.

It’s a tough process. You have to make an effort.

With that in mind, I contacted a few experts on networking Continue reading →

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The building blocks of accomplishment (not just work)

28 Nov Office blocks

Hi there. I’ve got fifteen minutes to write, and I thank you for taking a few minutes to read. This is fun, isn’t it?

I’ve been thinking about the way I organize my days lately, and how I set up my schedule to accomplish the most possible in the time I have. I’m sure you’ve had days when it seems like there are a constant string of interruptions, emails, instant messages and alerts.

When I have those days, it feels like nothing gets done. Instead of getting just one big thing accomplished, I tend to myriad little things, and at the end of the day (or even just the end of the hour) I look back and can’t really point to anything that I’ve accomplished that’s significant.

That bugs the heck out of me.

So, how can I make an impact?

One blogger and novelist suggested that the way she writes is called “time blocking.” She outlines the key things she wants to get accomplished, and estimates how long each will take. Then her blocks of time are stacked, rearranged or pushed forward based on her own whims.

This makes a ton of sense to me. Following her structure, my day might look something like this:

  • Meet with boss – 1 hour
  • Work on RFP content –  2 hours
  • Update marketing class – 90 minutes
  • Revise video graphics – 90 minutes

And so on. (You think those are the only things on my plate? HA!)

The point is that I have a sense of my key projects and the time I need to devote just to get them done. Interruptions slow me down. Answering questions from email drains precious minutes from those time blocks.

So my goal is to change the way I work. Instead of bouncing in and out of email, I’m ignoring it (gasp!) for an hour and just getting a single project done. Without those interruptions, I complete the time block faster and with greater depth of thought.

And, as my friend Nancy Morris reminds us, it’s not about time. It’s about priorities. Even though it looks like I’m just arranging my schedule and time, what’s really happening is that I choose to place a priority on accomplishment, that I let myself go deep deep deep into what really matters at the exclusion of all else, at least for that hour or two.

How do you manage your time and priorities? Do you toggle back and forth between screens on your computer when email messages pop up? Consider how depth of focus in these time blocks might make you more productive, or at least take a little frenetic energy out of your day.

GO.

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Forget flowers, say it with cupcakes: Three more speaking tips

22 Nov We made cupcake flags (like these pirate flags) with various messages for the event. I said, "Choose a cupcake that speaks to you."

Hi, I’m back with three more public speaking tips that I can dash down in fifteen minutes. I promise not to run long. (Remember, sticking to time was one of the first three tips I gave you.) Here they are:

Tip #4: Don't accuse your audience with the word "you."

Don’t accuse. Most of my presenting these days is done for colleagues, many of whom are senior to me. They’re already taking a leap of faith to listen to me: for some, I’m twenty years their junior and ten or twenty years less experienced in real estate (I’ve been in this industry for 11 years now).

So when I show up with suggestions, tips and guidelines for how they market themselves and their business, you can imagine that a bunch of finger-pointing doesn’t get me very far. The word you stands out as an accusation: “You should do this!” and “You aren’t doing it right.”

Changing my language, I could say, “We can do this,” and “Our company does this,” and “We’ve found this works….”

One of my mentors alerted me to the nuance of this language pattern and it absolutely floored me. I found myself crying, choked up over the idea that what I was delivering was not education, but accusation. It took me the rest of the forty minutes before my speaking segment to just recompose myself and think through how to use that critical (but painfully mistimed) advice.

Ever since then, my ears prick up whenever I hear a speaker say you.

It was never so obvious to me how poorly it came across than several years later in a live session that I was observing. Several senior managers were lounging in the back of the class, speaking up from time to time with comments on the speaker’s content for the class: “You should do this.” You, you, you.

Their intention was merely to support the speaker’s points, but they completely failed. I felt the audience withdraw. The air was seriously chilly.

When accused, do you dig in your heels? Do you get defensive? Yep, that’s what this language produced.

Connect back. Often, speakers arrive shortly before their session begins, present their dog and pony show, and then pack up for their flight out of town. I see this as a huge mistake, a missed opportunity.

When presenting at a training camp in Prague, I was planning to sit in with the managers to hone my own leadership skills. But when it was decided that I’d be presenting to the sales team instead of the managers, I immediately switched tracks and sat in with the producers for every session.

By being engaged and alert for all the teaching that came before me, I could make notes and build references into my own presentation. These connections made a huge impact, amplifying the “ah-ha” factor of my message.

I also got a sense of the tone of the room—who speaks up? Who hangs back? Was I going to have to manage an energetic, rowdy group, or a passive or tired group of people? Understanding where the group’s energy is at allowed me to change my game plan for presenting to ensure people were most engaged.

Try an object lesson. In college as a senior resident adviser, one of the cardinal rules in programming events and presentations was “serve food.” Add that element, and I could pretty much guarantee the attendance of thirty hungry students, no matter how dull the subject matter.

Now, in the corporate world, I see that this kind of bribery works sometimes—and sometimes it doesn’t. I watched one executive try to drum up participation by handing out gift cards to people who asked questions. Nice tactic (if you’ve got the funds to do it), but not memorable. I remember more about the gift cards than I remember about the presentation itself.

In another presentation, I collaborated with a senior executive who was talking about work styles and identity. We were thinking about how to really engage people, how to get them “off their dot” (another way of saying “out of their comfort zone”) to declare their identity.

We made cupcake flags (like these pirate flags) with various messages for the event. I said, "Choose a cupcake that speaks to you."

Here’s what we did: I spent $40 at Costco to bring seven dozen cupcakes to the office. I laid them out beautifully with fresh strawberries on a tablecloth. Then, in the top of the cupcakes, I inserted little flags on toothpicks. Each flag had one of sixteen different messages, such as “I make work more fun,” and “I never let a detail slip through the cracks” and “I’m the visionary.”

It was so fun to see more than sixty colleagues choose a cupcake that spoke to them, and then watch as the senior executive wove that into his presentation. It made an impact. I still see those little flags up in cubicles around work. People still remember his talk.

Do you love or hate public speaking? Do you have tips to share with me? I love observing talented speakers (I’m addicted to TED talks!) and I’m always learning from them.

What have you got to say? GO.

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Hook, time and sinker: Three tips for speakers

21 Nov 11.21 Rockin speech

I’m usually a contrarian, so wouldn’t you expect that the number one fear most people have—public speaking—is actually one of my favorite things to do?

Yep. I love it. Put me in front of people and I’m eager to talk about any topic I’m passionate or knowledgeable about. In high school and college, I started honing this skill through competitive speech and debate. As a journalist, I presented to professional associations, on the radio, and spoke on panels.

Now, as a commercial real estate marketer, I speak to hundreds of people through Colliers University, my firm’s professional development arm, both at live training sessions and on live and recorded webinars. (My colleagues there recently calculated that I’d delivered more than 2,200 hours of original course content to our people!)

As I said, I like public speaking.

So, in this fifteen minutes, I thought it made sense to write a few tips I’ve learned from some very smart public speakers and from my own experience. I jotted down six tips, but that’s more than I can cover in just fifteen minutes, so here are the first three:

Hook your audience with a structured speech.

Have a hook. When presenting to a Public Relations Society of America local chapter, I was asked to talk about how to connect with reporters better. Sounds simple, yes. But not exactly scintillating.

My hook for this presentation was a Top 10 list of things you shouldn’t say to a reporter, such as “We’re advertisers, you know” and “You just did a story on our competition, so you should write about us, too.”

Taking the contrarian view, rather than a list of ten things you should do, had the audience mentally reviewing whether they’d made some of those blunders before. After my speech, they asked lots of questions.

The hook, ten things, also kept my audience engaged because they had a sense of my pacing. It gave them a specific set of notes to take—I saw people reengage each time the next tip came up, jotting it down.

Stick to the time. At our company’s global training camp, the organizers usually invite top producers to speak to rising stars about the strategies they used to build their business. It is a great session—funny, engaging and quite revealing about these multimillion-dollar producers.

The plan was to go about an hour, with each of three top producers talking for twenty minutes. One guy described building his business with his partner, and then he went on. And on. And on. And on.

He was supposed to talk for about twenty minutes, and by the forty minute mark, he was still going, and you could tell people had checked out.

At one point, he even commented “I know I’m probably over my time, but [and I’m paraphrasing here, but not by much] I’m really interesting.” He blathered on for almost an hour, and the audience thinned. I was embarrassed for him.

Had he stopped at twenty minutes, I might remember a bit of his presentation today. Instead, it sticks out in my mind only as an awful reminder of how to alienate your audience. Set the expectation for time and stick to it.

As a presenter, "going casual" should mean losing the jacket and tie, not dressing in something rumpled off your bedroom floor.

Be polished. I once presented side-by-side with a person who was very senior to me. We were at the global training camp, which is shorts-and-flipflops casual for all the students. Although I went casual throughout the event, for my presentation, I showed up in a suit jacket, dress and heels. It’s what most of the presenters wear, and what I believe demonstrates polish.

My co-presenter showed up in ratty jeans, a faded logo T-shirt and the most horribly crumpled button-down shirt thrown over it (left untucked and unbuttoned). Although his presentation was fair, he got several comments about how he looked on the evaluation forms.

Why distract your audience? Why let a polished presentation come undone with your attire? It’s like handicapping yourself before you’ve even started speaking.

My time’s up, and I’ll be back later to add the other three tips (one of which had me broken-down bawling just minutes before my own presentation!). In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this, my greatest fear: Spiders.

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