High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: 8 Tips to Help You Manage Stress

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• 8 Tips to Help You Manage Stress: "You can’t fight it if you don’t know what it is. If a certain situation or person at work pushes your buttons, own that feeling."

• Making the Most of Strategic Relationships: "Great products are rarely invented by solo practitioners. Great companies cannot be produced by a recluse. Our increasingly interdependent world makes relationship-building more critical than ever."

• 5 Interview Lines That Make Job Interviewers Cringe: "You should have questions! Asking questions is how you determine if this job, this manager and this employer are right for you."

• 4 Ways You Know It's Time to Make the Leap and Start Your Own Business: "There is no one who can tell you, ultimately, what’s right for your life and your business but you. Trust your gut."
• How to Be Productive During the Summer: "Work hard, rest well. The hard work will keep you from being distracted by the temptations of summer, while the days off will help you enjoy those temptations."

Five Tips for Building Mental Strength in Your Career and in Life

It is inevitable that we experience setbacks in our lives and our careers. Success requires failure, and it necessitates failing many times and trying again after each disappointment or difficulty.

A Japanese proverb encourages us to "fall seven times, stand up eight."

We must develop mental strength in order deal with the failures and setbacks we experience in our personal and professional lives if we want to see those failures lead to success and positive outcomes. Too many of us retreat from failure, allowing it to define us, or allow difficulties to make us feel trapped, unworthy, and unable to move forward and reach our goals.

Instead we need to continually work to develop our mental strength and the following five practices will help do just that.

Let go. Put the past behind you and move on from your previous failures and disappointments. Learn what you need from them but don't be held back or defined by setbacks. This might require you to focus on changing your thoughts when you are troubled by the failures of the past. Telling yourself something simple like "that is behind me and today is a new and successful day" can be a effective technique to change your focus from the past to the present.

Practice meditation. Take some time each day, preferably just after you wake up, to set your day with some mindful meditation. Focus on breathing deeply and use this time for prayer or to repeat a short mantra that inspires you. This practice will help calm you, give you greater clarity of purpose, and will put your thoughts in a positive place to start the day.

Surround yourself with like-minded people. It's very important to have friends and colleagues around who encourage and inspire you. Be around people who understand the importance of taking risks and failing, who applaud you for taking action and trying something new. It is equally important to avoid time with people who frequently complain, are negative, discourage you from going after your dreams, or seem to take some pleasure in pointing out your weaknesses and failings.

Watch what you take in. We are what we eat and we are what we consume through the books we read, the movies we watch, the podcasts or radio programs we listen to, or the music we enjoy. Eating healthy food and surrounding ourselves with positive and encouraging media can be a tremendous source of strength, similar to being around a wise mentor or a great friend.

Act and fail and act and succeed, and be grateful for it all. The process of taking some action, of failing and getting back up, and trying again, and achieving some success builds our mental strength and enables us to continue to act, fail, and succeed. Pay attention to the process, and work at enjoying all of it, while expressing gratitude for what you're building and the strong and resilient person you're becoming.

4 Practices to Implement in 2016 to Improve Your Life and Career

Let's not call these resolutions, ok? Resolutions can be daunting and we often implement them for a few weeks (or days) before dropping them and never looking back.

If we look at the following practices as just that, simple practices or strategies that can bring added value to your life but don't require fierce diligence, then perhaps we'll be more likely to incorporate some of them into our routines.

1. Meditation. No, we're not suggesting you become a monk or anything but a regular habit of even brief meditation has been shown to bring great benefits such as reducing stress and boosting productivity. There's even an app for it!

2. Sleep. Yes, this is often the first casualty of a busy life but 7-8 hours of sleep is critical to functioning effectively and being at your best every day. Research indicates that losing four hours of sleep at night produces a state near drunkenness and going to work in a drunken state is not likely to result in a good day.

3. Movement. We now live primarily sedentary lifestyles as we spend increasing amounts of time in front of screens every day. To be at our best and have increased energy we need to move. A simple practice of getting up every hour and taking a brief 5 minute walk will do wonders. As Tom Rath notes, "If you eat, move, and sleep well today, you will have more energy tomorrow. You will treat your friends and family better. You will achieve more at work and give more to your community."

4. Relationship. We need other people to be at our best and to live well. Make a practice of eating lunch with colleagues and scheduling monthly (if not weekly) time to spend with a close friend. Ensure that this time allows for some dedicated and concentrated time to talk.

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: 5 Things to Stop Doing at Work

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

© Bellemedia | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

• 5 Things to Immediately Stop Doing at Work: "You may be so used to trying to knock three things off of your to-do list at once that focusing on a single task seems like a luxury. But ... research from Stanford University has shown that your productivity seriously suffers when you attempt to accomplish too much at the same time."


• 10 Career Lessons You Should Learn by Your 30s: "It’s not always easy to spot the "good eggs" from those who are insincere or who have a bad reputation that could tarnish yours. And if you’ve made professional enemies, their impressions could come back to haunt you later in your career."


• Stop Trying to Please Everyone: "While saying yes to every assignment may initially please senior execs, it usually leaves people over-stressed and inundated with work — a lot of which ends up half-finished or forgotten. In the long run, no one is happy."


• 6 Ways Women Sabotage Their Professional Success: "What message do you want to send? Pay attention to your language, choose your words carefully and for goodness’ sake, do not use minimizing language that takes away the power of your message."


• If You're Not Happy Make a Change: "Simply taking action doesn’t guarantee results ... But if you don’t take action there is only one guarantee, and that is your situation will never improve and you will remain unhappy."

Five Questions to Make Your Relationship with Your Boss Stronger

It goes without saying that relationships at work are important, but - arguably - the most important relationship you will have is that with your supervisor. Studies have found that a positive relationship with your supervisor can decrease work exhaustion and increase satisfaction. Further, a Gallup poll found that one of the biggest factors leading to someone quitting a position is the relationship with his/her supervisor. 

Given the importance of the supervisor/supervisee dynamic, what can workers do to strengthen this relationship? Simply letting it unfold without any direction, intervention, or intentionality is not a good idea: creative opportunities can be missed, communication styles can be misinterpreted, expectations can be misaligned, and both parties can fail to feel valued by the other.

Take the initiative to design a strong relationship with your supervisor. When you first start in a position, set up a meeting and delve into these five important questions:

How do you prefer to communicate? Some supervisors are upfront, some supervisors are more indirect. Learning about and understanding how your supervisor communicates can significantly strengthen  your relationship as it can lead to a better level of understanding between the two of you. You can further expand this question to learn how your supervisor likes to have information delivered: phone, email, or quick stop-ins in his/her office.

What are our work priorities right now? This question may seem apparent, but - rest assured - misaligned priorities occur frequently in the workplace. Use this question to get clear on where to focus your time and what your deliverables should be.

What feedback do you have for me? Keeping feedback as a constant agenda item every time you meet will create an expectation that you want to know how you are doing and that your supervisor's feedback is important to you. 

What aspects of office/department culture should I be aware of? Asking this question will clue you in to things such as busy times of the year, how to work with other departments, insights about creating relationships with coworkers, and other important components that will affect your job satisfaction and how you work.

How can I help right now? The thrust of this question is immediacy, demonstrating initiative and focus. Ask this, and then deliver to the best of your ability.

There are more questions than are listed here, but this is a concise start. Do not take for granted your relationship with your supervisor; be proactive and direct it productively and with purpose.

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: Networking, Resumes, and Over-working

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share these every weekend so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

1. 10 Lies We Tell Ourselves About Networking
"Take a minute to think about the successful people you know and what makes them successful. Chances are they are masterful networkers and they did this by finding their own way to build mutually beneficial relationships."

2. 10 Career Facts You'll Learn After College 
"Despite what you'd like to believe, many employers won't care where you went to school, or even what you earned your degree in. They'll focus instead on your skills."

© Bellemedia | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos 

3. What to Do When You Have to Work with Someone You Don't Like
"(W)orking with people you don't like becomes a lot more interesting. Because getting to know them better, and accepting the parts of them you don't like, is actually getting to know yourselfbetter and accepting the parts of yourself you don't like."

4. How to Take Your Resume From "Blah" to "Wow"
"You are likely rivaling candidates whose qualifications are similar to your own. So, you must be the red balloon in the field of yellow ones if you want to get noticed."

5. Why Working More Than 8 Hours a Day Can Kill You  
"A combination of stress, raised blood pressure and unhealthy diets stemming from long working hours may be the cause of thousands of workers’ serious health problems."

Applying for the Same Job as a Friend - Part 2 of 2

Last week's blog post presented a tricky scenario: a friend informs you that he is going to apply for a job that-as it turns out-you would be perfect for, too. After carefully assessing the position itself and contemplating your relationship with your friend, you have decided to apply. How do you break the news to your friend, and how will he take it? If you are interested in preserving your relationship with that friend, make note of the tips below to apply respectfully, appropriately, and in a way that minimizes the impact:

1. Make no mention of your application unless you get an interview: Even if you strongly feel that there will be no adverse impact to your relationship, there is no need to share news of your application before you get an interview. If you fail the initial screening, there is no affect on your relationship, so why say something that could have an impact if there is no impact? Keep it to yourself until something actionable occurs.

2. If the conversation needs to occur, be honest and upfront: If you find out that you have been accepted for an interview, there is still a chance that you will not get hired and your friend will never know. But at this stage, it is likely that the identity of the candidates will be revealed, particularly if the interviews are conducted by groups. It is now time to have the conversation. When you tell your friend, do so in a private place, preferably in person, and be direct with the fact that you assessed the opportunity yourself, felt it was a good fit for you and right for your career, and that you decided to apply. Emphasize that your reasons had nothing to do with your friendship and your hope that it will not be affected. 

3. Expect relationship strain: Despite every attempt to placate your friend, there still could be strain on your relationship. Some friends could be slightly hurt by this news, and others could see it as an out-and-out betrayal. If you have come this far, you should expect to encounter any of these reactions and determine, for you, if the impact on your relationship is worth it. Friends with strong relationships will be able to pull through, while others may not be able to. You have to be open to all possibilities and be ready to accept the consequences of your decisions. 

Two friends applying for the same position can be a true test of a relationship. But through objectivity, planning, and honesty the situation can be handled with grace. Good luck!

Applying for the Same Job as a Friend - Part 1 of 2

A close friend and coworker contacts you on the phone, talking excitedly. Listening more carefully than normal (you have to; you've never heard him so energetic!) you are able to decipher that he found a job posting with another company that would be perfect for him. "Check your email," he says, as he has sent you a link to the job description. After hanging up the phone and gently laughing to yourself, you make your way over to your computer to read the job description. When you get halfway through it, the smile disappears from your face. The added responsibilities, the ability to supervise more staff, the engagement with senior leadership...this position is fantastic.

In fact, it would be fantastic for you.

The above scenario sets in motion a not-uncommon ethical dilemma for job seekers: when two friends apply for the same job (particularly if one found out about it "first"). This is a tricky, burdensome, emotional space to exist in, one that needs to be handled with delicacy, honesty, and practicality. In this two-part series, we will delve into both the logical and emotional components of applying for the same job as a friend.

Pre-Application Assessment

Look at your potential application objectively: As talented, skilled, personable, connected, and everything in between that we feel that we are, none of us are shoo-ins for any job. Nearly all of us have a story where we did not make it past the application phase for a position that we felt we were perfect for. Further, with the many factors that go into hiring the right person for their position (including past experience, skills/abilities, how the candidate presents him/herself in an interview, references/recommendations, professional dress, the candidate's social media history, etc) it's impossible to say which of these is the determining factor that will lead to the candidate being eliminated. The point is that-controlling for these factors between you and your friend-there is no guarantee that you will or won't get the job, so check your ego at the door if you feel you will outperform your friend. All that you need to do is to determine whether you meet the minimum requirements to apply.

Look at your relationship with your friend: For most people, the most difficult part of these situations-even after convincing themselves that the application process won't favor one or the other-is their relationship with their friend. There are two possible outcomes if you apply: your friend will care or you friend will not care. If your friend doesn't care, you're fine; you go about your business and the chips fall where they may. But if you feel that your friend may care, or if you're not sure, you have to be prepare yourself for a tough conversation...and possibly the loss of the friendship. 

Next week: how (if necessary) to have a conversation with your friend.