Successful Blog

Are You Just Like Everyone Else Too?

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cooltext443860173_ive-been-thinking

about my life, my likes, my aspirations.

I so like to travel. It’s more than the green grass feeling. It’s the something’s there I need to see before I die feeling. Can I possibly live a full life in one place? Can I have life, a full life moving all over the place like I do?

I need more life, more lifes, more lifetimes, more life times, more time, more times.

I want a chance to be Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa, Betty Crocker and Tom Peters. I want to be Donald Trump and Princess Diana. I want go live in a cabin off the land. I want to live by the beach and sleep on the sand. I want to live with every one of my friends. I want to live in another country in a tiny village and ride a bike everywhere I go. I want to be a gardener, a gymnast, a piano player, a mathematician, a poet. I want to direct music videos.

I want to sleep in a king-sized bed with a seatbelt on an airplane.

I want to live in the highest, highrise in the biggest, busiest city. I want to be a recluse and reflect on deep, long thought with lovely music playing while I drink hot chocolate and write. I want to have a personal shopper, a driver, and a minder. I want to follow my own path and walk off into the sunset and never have to worry about good byes.

I want to be simple and complex. I want to be open and mysterious. I want to be a grownup and a child.

I’m just like everyone else I guess.

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How to Spot a Micromanager

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We’ve all been guilty at one time or another of being a micromanager whether it was in the workplace or other facets of our lives.

You can usually spot a micromanager a mile away – the individual who wants to be a good leader but goes about in the wrong manner. While trying to better their workers, athletes, students, loved ones etc. they end up creating an issue that was not there in the first place.

The micromanager in many instances becomes just that because they want to make sure everything goes according to plan, their plan.

Whether it is the boss who doesn’t have enough faith in their workers, the teacher who strays from the lesson or the coach who doesn’t trust his team, they end up micromanaging and with it bring added stress to a situation. Another way to describe it is the micromanager wants full control and will accept nothing less.

Most micromanagers come about their title unbeknownst to them. They oftentimes don’t go out of their way to fill this role, but once it consumes them they know nothing else. Like it or not, they have programmed themselves for this part and they are unlikely to change unless called on it.

 

Dangers of Micromanaging

For those individuals who have willingly or surprisingly become a micromanager, there are options. They can continue to let this role define them as managers, coaches, teachers, etc. or they can do something about it.

One of the first things the micromanager needs to assess is how their actions are impacting not only those under them, but themselves. For many micromanagers, their leadership skills or lack thereof eventually lead to them burn out, taking some of those under them along the way.

While some micromanagers need to assume that role for a while if those under them lack certain skills and/or experience, others run the potential of alienating the very individuals they spend time working with, teaching and coaching.

No one wants to feel like they are somehow inferior to those above them, made to think like they cannot make a decision or carry out a project. The person in many cases will eventually tune out the micromanager, leading to an awkward relationship at best among the two.

Having discussed the dangers, how do you know if you in fact are a micromanager?

Among the telltale signs of this problem are:

  • You decide that instead of working to educate others and provide constructive criticism , you in fact treat them as inferior, being fast to highlight their mistakes;
  • You find the need to order individuals around;
  • You have a short fuse and become frustrated, defensive and/or lash out at those who contest something you did or said;
  • You are upset when someone goes above your head to deal with your micromanaging issues.

Given the fact we all have been guilty at some point in our lives of micromanaging others, it is important to not immediately play the victim game. Whether it is in the office, the classroom or other walks of life, micromanaging doesn’t serve either the person in charge or those under them any good.

Many of us are taught from an early age that we are either followers or leaders. For many micromanagers, they take the leadership role a little too far, eventually isolating themselves as someone who others do not want to deal with.

In the event you’ve been labeled a micromanager or feel some of the above items may actually describe your leadership skills, don’t think that you cannot change things. The benefits to removing the micromanager title from your resume are numerous.

Remember, an even bigger and better leader is one who can admit their deficiencies and learn from them.

Photo credit: smh.com.au

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like online marketing and is based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

Get Off the Bus and Head Toward True North With Burning Desire

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Leaders Live Up to Their Own Standards

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It’s a story of politics at work …

Blindedsided by a Romulan Warbird

It was a Friday afternoon in a past life, as they say. I was working late when Dina stopped by. Dina managed a new editor, Marilyn, who also worked on one of my projects. We often conferred on Marilyn’s progress. I thought Dina had come in to add something to our discussion.

As a social person, Dina was part of a catty little clique that had opinions on everything. I avoided both the group and their opinions when I could.

Dina smiled sweetly as she came into my office, sat herself down, and offered some minor pleasantries — always her style. Then she dropped her cloaking device and hit me head-on like a Romulan Warbird.

“We’ve been talking about you, and we’ve decided that we don’t like you talking about people when they’re not in the room, . . . in particular, we don’t like you talking about Marilyn.” She proceeded to use a good twenty minutes describing everything that was wrong with me as a person, which included a sidebar on why no person on the planet could possibly stand to work with me. I should have seen it coming when I heard that lovely phrase, “It’s probably none of our business, but . . .”

I lived the word stunned.

As I sat facing rapid fire, I literally had to restart my brain to process the information. My thinking kept looping around the same question in amazement. Did she hear what she had just said? It was a full-out admission that she had been doing exactly what she was shooting me for. In my neighborhood that wasn’t fair. Add to that the fact that she was the only one with whom I had discussed Marilyn.

My brain was misfiring. The opening narration from The Outer Limits was being read by Rod Serling as Salvadore Dali painted the scene in my office somewhere in the far reaches of my mind.

This female sitting across from me was an editor and a manager. What had she done with the facts? The only plausible answer was: she had no use for the facts. Dina had been passive-aggressive since I’d arrived at the company. She thought that my job should have been hers. So I don’t suppose that she was predisposed to caring about the facts. I let her say her piece. It was brutal. I went home.

My natural response is to fix things. I looked for ways to resolve this. Every solution that presented itself had me giving up ground. I didn’t want her friendship, but I didn’t need to be bullied again either. It was a miserable weekend. It took self-respect to go to work that Monday.

Had I been wiser then, I wouldn’t have wasted a weekend trying to fix the un-fixable. I know now that even if I’d saved Warbird’s life, I’d be that awful person who’d somehow done a good thing. That’s how those things work.

Every now and then I hear about Warbird and occasionally bump into her at conferences. I always stop to talk. She always seems nervous. I like to think that I’ve changed. Maybe she will too. Then again, maybe she won’t. She’s still at the old company — in the same job she got when I left.

Me? I’m long gone from there.

How did I get to be someone who worked with people like that?

I had changed myself to fit into the transportation that took me to the buildings where I worked in the jobs that I got because I mastered the right skill sets. Often I was bored and didn’t feel successful. I was managing not leading. I didn’t know it, but I was working for a paycheck or working just to work.

Some days I asked myself, “Am I good enough to be here?” and “What am I supposed to do next? Will I be on the bus that’s going from good to greatness?” I was on a path — the one laid out before me — but I had totally lost track of myself

Once I even said yes when the right answer was no.

Now I see that I’m not the only one who has done that…

Yet leaders don’t ride a bus to get from good to great. They walk their own path.

The more Ghandi, Oprah, Mandela, Catherine the Great, Bill Gates, Melissa Mayers, and Steve Jobs came to know themselves, the better leaders they became. They lived and lived up to their own standard of greatness.

True leaders do their own thinking; they know who they are and know that their true north comes from the inside. They own their values, skills, and experience. They are moved by a burning desire to build what they can’t build alone. That burning desire is what defines their path.

It’s not whether you’re an entrepreneur or working in a warehouse that makes you a leader. It’s whether we own our values and our path. Then we can contribute deeply and clearly to any business we choose to make part of our lives.

We become a leader the day we decide who we are, where we’re going, and how we’ll get ourselves there.
Who’d want to follow you if you haven’t done that?

What have you decided about yourself and your own true north?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

My Experience with Cliffs and Decisions

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2016 GeniusShared Read from Liz StraussI’ve been thinking about falling off cliffs.

I’m fairly sure I was born with a fear of heights.

My uncle, the photographer, didn’t have such fear. And as I recall, the rest of my family didn’t either.

And my uncle — the one with all of the expensive photography equipment — would find every opportunity to take pictures that involved standing my cousins and I near dramatic scenery.

I was always the one who ended up on the cliff side. It was always impossible to find my smile.

Even now, I can’t walk up to the edge of a cliff without thinking that the stone will give way. My imagination has me tumbling, down, down, down . . . even though, I’m fairly certain that’s not meant to be a scene in my life.

I used to have the same experience with decisions. Choosing any option would leave wondering whether the choice would fall out from under my feet. Then I realized the only thing between me and every success I every won was a decision that I would succeed.

Maybe it’s the awe inspiring beauty of the world that sets me on my heels.
Maybe it’s the awe inspiring idea that I can determine the course of my life.

I still respect cliffs and decisions, but now I place my feet firmly in where I stand so that down, down, down isn’t on mind.

The Leadership Role of Blending Work, College, and Family

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The Audacity of Tenacity in Leadership
A Guest Post by Val White

I had finished an Associates Degree in Business when I was younger and pre-children. When my first child came along, I found a way to work from home while participating in my young child’s life. Two years ago, I felt it was time for me to go back to work and rejoin the corporate world.

I quickly discovered that a lot had changed in the 10 or so years that I had stepped away to care for my family. My skills needed refreshing. I wasn’t interested in the same things. I had changed and so had my choice of careers. I knew I needed to go back to school. I also needed to tend to my family and contribute to the family budget with a full-time job. After much research and soul-searching, I settled on a state college that combined virtual program with a “brick-and-mortar” college experience.

Today, I’m in the last course before I’ve fully earned my Bachelors degree in Information, Networking, and Telecommunications (with an emphasis on Web Development). Getting here wasn’t easy. I still have to get that degree to payoff in new career opportunities.

But I can easily say that I’ve achieved a lot.

The Innovative Leadership of Blending Work, College, and Family Life

A favorite article at NewandImproved.com, The Way of the Innovative Leader resonated with me as it laid out five leadership traits found in those who live and inspire great thinking in the people around them. (© 2006 New & Improved®, LLC. Mailto: info@newandimproved.com) And as I read the article over, I came to realize that those same traits were what I came to value as I grew into the role of non-traditional college student, who also had both a family and a job.

These are the five traits I relied on to keep going when I might have stopped. Whatever your situation, these five will serve you well in getting you to your goal.

Integrity:

Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t make promises that you can’t or don’t intend to keep. In the lifestyle challenges of family, college, and job, you may find yourself overwhelmed if you haven’t developed the ability to say “no” to things that will add more clutter and demands on your time. Inevitably, something is going to fall off the edge if you fill your to-do list with too much. It’s easy to get your priorities mixed up in the attempt to do it all. The lines easily become mixed: family, college, job – college, family, job – dreams of future career, college, family, umm…job. If things get out of hand, it’s best to stop everything for a moment, a day, or a weekend and reevaluate your priorities.

Tenacity:

Wiktionary.org defines tenacity as …
“The quality or state of being tenacious; as, tenacity, or retentiveness, of memory; tenacity, or persistency, of purpose.”

I also love this definition:
“The greatest longitudinal stress a substance can bear without tearing asunder, – usually expressed with reference to a unit area of the cross section of the substance, as the number of pounds per square inch, or kilograms per square centimeter, necessary to produce rupture.”

I’ve endured a few semesters where I truly felt I would “tear asunder!”

There will come days that it’s all you can do to put one foot in front of the other and make sure the essential tasks have been completed. Truly, keeping a firm and unshakable picture in your mind of your goals and purposes is so very important in order to withstand these days when they come.

Curiosity:

As a non-traditional, adult student with some life experience, I found learning much more of an adventure than I did in my earlier years. Instead of just coasting through a class to get the credits, I found more benefit in finding ways to apply this new knowledge to my career goals and asking myself how it applies to right now or 5-10 years from now.

Being curious will surely expand your vision and enlarge your understanding of your world.

Courage:

What will others think and/or say to me when I tell them I’m going back to college? Is it really a waste of time and money? After all, I have more lost career years behind me than I have ahead of me. Will I really be able to apply what I’ve learned?

It takes courage to face your own demons and plunge into the unknown. For some, it’s an ongoing battle or one they don’t even wish to start. I’ve found that whatever it is that you’re afraid to start or when you want to give up, remembering one simple truth is a great motivator: you’ve got something to contribute that is uniquely you and nobody else can do it.

Humility:

Referring again to wiktionary.org, the definition of humble is,

“thinking lowly of one’s self; claiming little for one’s self; not proud, arrogant, or assuming; lowly; weak; modest.”

This doesn’t necessarily appear to be an attractive trait, does it? In reality, when approaching this lifestyle of family-college-job, there will be many opportunities to practice humility … and come out stronger from it. Simply entering a college program is a statement that you don’t know it all and you’re in need of help in achieving your future goals. You’re going to need to engage with instructors and other learners in discussions that might prove that others will have better ideas than you do. But more than this, you’ll find humility when you reach out to others around you for support, advice, and help with daily tasks.

So, how did these experiences and traits contribute to my job of being a role model?

Quite simply, my husband and children watched me – day by day and night after night of late night homework. They cheered with me when I reported my test and homework scores. They listened to my frustrations and they helped lighten my load when they could. I hope that I offered my family.a chance to see and develop these essential leadership traits to serve them in throughout their lives.

You have no choice about being a role model. You are one … it comes with the job. The only choice you have is which role you’ll model. – The Way of the Innovative Leader

Those concise three sentences are the sum of the reasons I chose to finish my college aspirations as an adult.

And why I know I’ll also achieve all of my goals.

What is your leadership role?

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Val White is a mom, web developer, and student at FHSU fhsu.edu. She is just now venturing out of the safe confines of the FHSU online class discussion board and looking for new opportunities to contribute on the web. You can find her portfolio at valwhitewebdev.com.

Thanks, Val! Amazing story. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Beach Notes: Whale Sculpture

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

At this time of the year it’s a common occurrence for us to see one or more whales just offshore from our local beaches, on their annual migration north. Occasionally we are lucky enough to see one breaching. The picture is of one of the sculptures in the 2008 Swell sculpture festival – an annual event – at Currumbin Beach, about 15 minutes from where we live. “Helidon Breach”, the title of the work by Matthew Bath, references both the magnificent sight of a whale breaching and the source of the beautiful white Australian sandstone from Helidon, Queensland.

Helidon Breach by Matthew Bath

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh