Friday, March 13, 2009

Positive Personal Impact: A Major Key to Success

All successful people create positive personal impact.Positive personal impact is like charisma, only more so.People gravitate towards people with positive personal impact.When you create positive personal impact other people want to be around you.They want to work with you.They want to be your friend.

People with positive personal impact develop and nurture their personal brand.They are impeccable in their presentation of self.They know and follow the basic rules of etiquette.If you master these three keys, you'll be able to create positive personal impact.

Develop and Nurture Your Unique Personal Brand


Your personal brand differentiates you from everyone else in the world.

My brand is "The Common Sense Guy." Because of my brand, people know that they can rely on me to provide them with common sense advice that will help them reach their career and life goals.They also know that they will get this advice in a straightforward, easy to understand and apply manner, because after all, I'm just a guy.

Spend time crafting your brand.Think of it this way; your brand is the two or three words you want people to most often associate with you.Decide what you want these words to be, and then go about making sure that all of the people with whom you come into contact think of you that way.This is important, because if you don't brand yourself, others will.It's better to be in control of your personal brand by creating it yourself, than it is to let others create it for you.

No matter what stage you are in your career, ask yourself a few simple questions.How do you want people to think of you?What words will you choose for people to describe you?Think about these questions.Take your time.Then do whatever it takes to make sure that other people think of you that way.

For example, if you decide that "hard working" is a term with which you would like others to associate with you, then work hard.Do your assignments well and on time.When you finish with one task, ask for another.Come early, stay late.Ask questions to help you understand the business.Pretty soon, people will begin thinking of you as a hard worker.Someone who does everything we ask, and then asks for more.Once this happens, you'll know that you're on your way to creating your own special and unique personal brand.

You're smart enough to figure out what to do to create the brand you want.The important thing is to choose your brand and then brand yourself.

Dress to Impress


Your appearance says a lot about you.

My best advice on to how your attire can help you create positive personal impact is simple and common sense.Dress one level up.In other words, dress a little nicer than you have to.For example, if your office is casual, wear a dress or a suit every once in a while.

Make sure your clothes and shoes are clean and in good repair.Keep your hair clean and well styled.Make sure your shoes are shined.Keep your accessories understated and elegant.

Look in the mirror on your way out the door.Ask yourself, "Will I impress other people with the way I look today?" If the answer is no, take a few minutes and change before you go to work.

I always get dressed up when I am meeting clients.Many of my clients dress casually.When they tell me, "You didn't need to wear a suit today," I say, "Yes I did.I'm meeting with an important person-you.Show respect for yourself and the people around you by dressing well and looking good.

Be a Lady or Gentleman


Finally, all that stuff your Mom told you about being polite is true.

You can never go wrong by acting like a lady or gentleman.I try to act as a gentleman at all times.

Handwritten thank you notes are a great way to distinguish yourself as a lady or gentleman.Here are three tips for writing great thank you notes.
1) Write legibly.
2) Identify the gift you received: be specific.Your note will be more personal this way.
3) Mention how you plan on using the gift.You can create all sorts of positive personal impact with thank you notes.If you haven't yet written thank you notes for the graduation gifts you've received, write them tonight.

As with most things, there is one rule of etiquette that I always follow: I always try to help the people around me feel comfortable.For example, when you are dining with others, you may know that your water glass is on the right and that your bread and butter plate is on the left, but others may not.So if someone uses your bread plate, don't say "Hey, that's mine, yours is over there." Just place your roll on your dinner plate.Being right is no excuse for embarrassing someone, and it certainly won't help you create positive personal impact.


About the Author

Ray Subs is a public relations specialist working with The Common Sense Guy--Bud Bilanich.

For more common sense advice about success visit SuccessCommonSense.com.

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Great Leaders are Coached, Not Born!

Are your leadership skills all they could be?Knowing where your strengths and weaknesses are as a manager is the first step toward becoming a better leader - great coaching is the second step!Coaching accelerates growth and contributes to success.Whether you're an executive, a manager or a team leader, the following information will be beneficial to you.

Do you promote a vision, mission, and purpose for your company--yet no one follows you?Do you empower others--yet these same people criticize you?Do you allow ongoing conflicts among managers?Do you avoid admitting a mistake?

If you answered any of these questions "yes", you are among the vast majority of us who could benefit from coaching!A coach can be critical to any leader's success.Listening to theories and concepts will not, by itself, develop leadership.Coaching provides feedback, while projects and people issues are being handled.It will develop and strengthen solid leadership skills.Coaching accelerates growth and contributes to success!A good coach can help you:


Set and achieve goals!

If you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there?To achieve results, you must set goals and develop a structure to track and ensure progress.Put together action plans and review them frequently!

Be consistent!Maintain your commitment to fulfill your goals, even when "you've hit the wall" and it looks like failure may be imminent.This sends a very clear message to your employees.It says they can trust you in good times and bad.It helps them make better decisions, and keeps them in action.

Work with and through others!This will help ensure that your job will be on time and within budget.Poor communication skills are a major factor in leadership failure.People are too often promoted for their successes, without assessment of their communication skills.Simply put, the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the more people rely on your communication skills.A leader with poor communication skills must improve, or negotiate another position without people responsibilities.The good news: Good communicators are coached, not born.

Listen to those with different ideas!Most people consider themselves good listeners, but they do not always hear the critical factors that keep customers and co-workers happy and satisfied.Knowing how to get a point across while listening to others, particularly when what you hear is unpleasant, can make or break your career!

Handle conflict promptly: The sooner you're able to resolve conflict, the less likely it will negatively impact your people, projects, and customers.Work will always include disagreements, differing points of view, and concerns that people bring from outside.The key is to resolve issues promptly, effectively and efficiently while empowering the people involved to work them through.Being accountable for ALL the results, including your own growth, is a true mark of a leader.Being accountable entails managing the details, and acknowledging the results' both positive and negative.Let others take credit for a job well done.

As a leader, hiring a coach can accelerate your growth and success.You will see your weaknesses faster and more clearly, and develop your strengths sooner and more fully.The fact that you are open to coaching will inspire confidence in your co-workers and customers.If your goal is to be a good leader, start by hiring a good coach!


About the Author

Jim Sirbasku is co-founder and CEO of Profiles International, a leading provider of human resource management solutions and employment assessments for businesses worldwide.

Find out if you have what it takes to be a great leader with coaching - visit our website.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Big Time Jobs For Small Time Pay

Millions of people around the world have these supposed "important jobs" and they are supposed "important workers" for these companies but yet they get paid less money per capita than say..the mail room clerk.It's not fair and frankly it's a little unsettling!

Of course if you try to get a new job elsewhere you could be stuck hearing the "we're sorry but you are overqualified" excuse.So what are you supposed to do?Just stick where you are and never get paid for what you are really worth?No way Jose!

A career change is always scary.I get that.But if you want to earn what you are really worth, then you will have to jump with faith and hope that you make out better than what you started with and for most people they do.You really wouldn't believe all the jobs available from home or online that are quite lucrative.

There are millions of people working from home right this very second, doing what they love and getting paid a really nice paycheck.If you are one of these people that want to be like one of those people, then you should check out some of the jobs listed below that you can do from your home!

Article Writing & Submission Services - If you're a good writer, you can actually make money doing what you love to do!You can build your own business and allow people to buy articles off of you on the Internet.People buy articles for all sorts of reasons, they might have a website, company, business, service or product they want to promote.

You can buy into websites for the submission part of the business and they will allow you to submit the articles these people will be asking you to write for them.You simply write the article for the buyer, include a link back (aka back link or reciprocal link) to their website and they will actually pay you for this!

You benefit because of the money and the exposure of your name, and they benefit because they will receive traffic and back links which could potentially mean sales and profits for them.Ultimately back links done right, never expire, so these back links you get for them will be around for a really long time.These are quality back links, which is what the buyer wants!

Freelance - This is pretty simple.If you can provide a service to someone, you can sell it online.Have it be designing websites, web hosting, domain registering, article writing, SEO, SEM, etc.If you know how to do something that will benefit someone else, you can easily make money off of this simply check out forums that have Marketplaces or Service sections, and try sites like e-lance or script lance.If you're good enough and people like your service you could make this a full-time business!

CPA Programs - CPA is sometimes referred to as "Cost Per Action", which has to do with the fact that most CPA offers by advertisers are about getting something (typically new customers by making sales).You can normally place CPA codes on your site, which will let you "sell" things from your site.When individuals sign up or buy the item, you will be given a certain percentage from the initial sale.

Say you are advertising an e-book on your website and someone clicks the advert and goes to the site, they will buy the e-book for $150 and then you receive 35% of the sale, which means you made $52.50 for just that one sale!These offers add up rather nicely especially if you get in with a CPA program that has high rates.

EBay & Affiliate Storefronts -
As far as shopfronts go, I actually like Amazon merely because they offer many diverse products on the website.
For example, I have a website, so I can go to Amazon and pick out different affiliates that I know that I will be utilizing at my joke site.Affiliates that offer such things as gag gifts, funny gifts, etc.

Once I find the affiliates to use I won't only set the affiliate links, but I can also set up affiliate websites.Then, I can either "sneak" in the affiliate links onto my blog, or I can also include the actual mini stores on my blog.This is good because people can visually see what I offer on my site.

Web Design & Development - These are two practices not everyone is good at.I can market, optimize, write do a ton of other things.But when it comes to web design or development the closest thing I know is Myspace html codes!I'm not the only fool like this!Again, there are millions of people out there that either don't know how to do this, or just don't have the time.This is a great service to offer if you know how to do it



About the Author

This author is a HUGE fan of You Can't Succeed By Having Negative Thoughts



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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Why ELearning Is Such a Powerful Training Approach

Over the past two decades we have seen a significant shift twoards eLearning - especially in areas where the focus is on vocational training and the acquiring of job-related skills.Many of these skills have a large computer-oriented component, so that makes eLearning especially appropriate for this type of training.

For example, when large numbers of workers are displaced from their jobs because of changing technology or other global trends, one of the first types of "retraining" they need is to bring them up to speed on the general use of personal computers in all types of business.ELearning courses are particularly suited to this task because learning on the computer gives them a chance to practise the very skills they are trying to learn.

But eLearning is not just about teaching people how to use computers.Rather, it is about using computers to teach people virtually anything.But of course the most important question is "Why?" Why use computers to teach things when for centuries it was assumed the best way to learn was at the feet of a learned instructor?

This really gets to the heart of the eLearning question.And as we will see, that question is not so much "Why?" as it is "Why Not?"


The simple fact is that the traditional learning model - a face to face relationship between teacher and student - is both expensive and inefficient.

That, at least, is what the advocates of eLearning maintain.

The first and most obvious advantage of eLearning is that for the most part it eliminates the need for the physical presence of a teacher in the learning process.Recorded media such as audio or video take the place of the teacher as the driving force that keeps the learning process going.This opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Using electronic media for learning may have its obvious downside when not used with sufficient skill and imagination.But it clearly makes for a much more efficient allocation of resources.

For instance in a face to face classroom situation an instructor can effectively address only 25 or 30 individual students at any one time.It is true that in university settings this is often expanded to large groups of people where hundreds of students may be addressed by a single instructor.But this is hardly an optimal learning environment.

The same instructor can turn the same material into an eLearning course of study and simultaneously address thousands of learners.And of course that's not the end of the story.These students are able to participate in the course of study on their own schedules (usually), and from their own locations - completely eliminating the need for classrooms, complex scheduling, or time and cost to travel back and forth to physical classrooms.

Web-based eLearning is also available to a much broader range of people from literally around the world.In many cases it also eliminates the need for the production and distribution of expensive text books or printed manuals.

ELearning can also be a richer, more versatile way to serve the needs of students with varying levels of skill, resources, and physical capabilities.Each individual learner can go at his or her own pace, skip material they consider irrelevant or less important, or take more time for things they find more difficult.This can go a long way towards eliminating frustration with themselves and their fellow learners.

One common criticism of eLearning programs is that they depersonalize the learning process.This happens first by removing the personal interaction between instructor and student, and second by eliminating the collaboration and social interaction that often goes on in a classroom environment between different students.

Overcoming these shortcomings of eLearning may be as simple as designing a better, more imaginative course, and a communication infrastructure that allows for interchange between different participants.For example, an effective eLearning course would be one that engages the student through the use of audio and video, and encourages interaction through different types of quizzes, surveys, contests and even competitions.

Meanwhile, on the communications front, technology that allows and encourages group participation and interaction is already widely used on websites such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.And it is common practice for tele-conferences and seminars to include live audio and chat windows that give participants the opportunity to interact in real time.All of these are inexpensive techniques that make it possible to add interactivity and collaboration to virtually any eLearning program that requires it.


About the Author

The custom eLearning solutions from ResourceBridge.

net are always engaging, motivating and appropriate for your specific audience and culture.They are designed to ensure the highest quality of computer- or web-based training across your entire community of learners.

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