We’ve heard the expression “work hard, play hard” but do we know what it means? For me, it’s a reminder to play as hard as we work for balance, but Forbes tells us in a new study exactly how hard we play after we work!

Daniela Butcura

The post do you? appeared first on Your Better Life.

Are you tired of the same old, same old at work? Ready for a change but don’t know where to start? This year, instead of spending your time cleaning out the closets and scrubbing the baseboards, put that energy into rejuvenating your career. By getting started on a career change in the spring, you can be settled into your dream job before the holidays are here again and life gets too busy. Here are the steps to make it happen.

1. Know what you want to change

What are you unhappy with in your job? Is your pay stagnant or your responsibilities monotonous? Do you want to work for a company with more women in leadership or better parental leave? There are a lot of good reasons to leave a job, but what you shouldn’t do is quit without understanding why you want to go. By identifying what you dislike about your current position, you can better spot the opportunities that match your goals and values.

2. Refresh your resume

You’ll want a resume ready to go before starting the next steps. That way, you can act without hesitation when you find the right opportunity. There are tons of tips and of step-by-step guides that tell you how to write a resume, but for most people, a resume builder is faster and gets just as good results. The key is knowing the right resume style and format for your industry. Most people default to a chronological resume, but if you’re changing careers or have a lot of details to cover, a combination resume is a better fit.

3. Update your job skills

Is your resume looking a little sparse? If you’re comparing your resume to job postings and feeling under qualified for the roles you want, look for ways to improve your job skills before entering the job market. That could mean pursuing a new certification, taking an online class, or getting familiar with the most current industry software. Look at open positions to find the specific skills employers want, then make a plan to close the gaps in your resume.

4. Start networking

Sure, you could launch your career change by blindly sending resumes in response to job postings. However, you’ll have much better success if you cultivate warm job leads. How do you do that? By reaching out to industry contacts and asking about opportunities — AKA networking.

Of course, you can’t send a message asking for a job lead after months of silence. Build up to the ask by reconnecting over industry news and events or asking for career advice.

5. Dive into the job search

By now you hopefully have a few warm leads and have identified target companies you’d like to work for. With everything in place, you can put your career change into action. Start crafting cover letters, fine-tuning your resume for individual jobs, and practicing your interview answers. With diligent preparation and a healthy dose of confidence, you can impress your future bosses and land the job that takes your career to the next level.

You’ll never reach your professional goals if you let your career coast without putting honest effort into it. But when job hunting is so draining, it’s easy to rationalize delaying a career change. Instead of letting another year pass you by, make time for your professional development this spring. With just a few weeks of work, you can find a job that fulfills you day after day — and that’s better than any cleaning spree you could do at home.

Gloria Martinez

The post Forget the House — Spring Clean Your Career! appeared first on Your Better Life.

Tired of the whiners, complainers, gripers and groaners in your workplace? Negative employees are an all-too-common anchor around the neck of too many work teams. 

Some studies suggest that about 70% of all conflicts in the workplace are based not on what people are saying, but how they say things. Moreover, it is estimated that in the typical workplace there are ten negative (“squawking seagull language”) comments to every one positive comment.

And it gets worse! Negative comments are thought to have five times the power of every positive comment – their impact is felt even more potently.

After a decade of research on high and low performing teams, Marcial Losada found that 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative emotions necessary to make a corporate team successful.  (Now that’s a rather specific number…you’re probably safe to round it off to three!)  This 3:1 ratio of positive to negative comments is known as the “Losada line.” And, ideally, Losada’s research found, if your workplace can boost the ratio to 6:1, the likelihood of greater team successes will follow, and you’ll have a far better chance of creating a truly inspiring workplace culture.

Of course, it’s not necessarily a simple shift to make. Negative energy begets more negative energy.  And don’t discount the notion that it’s fun to gripe! We all do it, and there are times when there’s nothing more fun than participating in a good mutual “rant-in” over a steaming cup of coffee.

So what can you do?

Start simply by raising awareness. Remind people of the power of the language they use in the workplace and to be aware of how they are coming across, including their body language, facial expressions, and overall energy level. Remind people that how they say things matters—a lot! 

A giant mascot, fun signs, and reminder messages throughout your office can help people think twice before they speak and encourage them to be aware of how they might be perceived.

To help your team become more conscious of its attitudes and language, try distributing some handheld counters, the kind museum attendants use to measure the number of people attending an exhibit. Then have everyone tally up the number of negative comments they either speak themselves or hear over the course of a week. Now unless you also tally the positives you won’t have a sense of the ratio, but at least you’ll raise awareness of the language being used on your team.

You also can try some other tricks, at least until you and your team are more aware of the language.  Snapping an elastic band on your wrist every time you say something negative, or having people pay a quarter into the social fund each time they use a “seagull comment,” are a little gimmicky, but they can be fun, help raise awareness and, at least at the start, help you raise loads of money!

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you also need to consider that the seagulls might just have something important to say, they just don’t know how to express it in a positive way.

Open and honest communication, including direct feedback and honest criticism, is a hallmark characteristic of any successful organization. After all, not every idea is a great idea! As draining as non-constructive negative energy is on a workplace, there’s also the danger of falling into “group think” mode, where teams that are too focused on putting on a warm and fuzzy happy face to avoid conflict at all costs end up ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room, wasting time and expending energy on truly bad, even dangerous ideas. When not all the voices get heard on a team, for fear of coming across as a seagull or fear of retaliation, then mistakes, sometimes critical ones, can happen and the best ideas don’t necessarily win the day.

Great workplaces create an environment where all ideas are open to inquiry and honest debate. 

Keep in mind, the reason employees sometimes resort to seagull behavior is because they haven’t been given all of the information, they feel excluded, or they feel like they haven’t  been heard and given a proper voice at the table. To build a great workplace culture, you need to differentiate between honest, open and constructive debate and criticism vs. draining, energy-sucking, destructive language.

And it’s not enough to simply tell people to, “Quit being seagulls!”

One of the keys to great communication success is to train, mentor and coach team members on how to give constructive criticism and express concerns in a more positive manner. You must show people how to move from destructive communication to constructive communication. From being a seagull, to well, becoming a dove. From complaining to explaining.

Think about the simple mindset shift when moving from a “complaining mode” to “explaining mode.” Explaining a position, explaining a perspective, explaining a concern suggests a more neutral, positive tone that encourages a dialogue, as opposed to a complaining mindset that conjures up the image of a drive-by rant.

Michael Kerr travels the world researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplace cultures. He is an international Hall of Fame business speaker, trainer, and the author of seven books, including The Humor Advantage and Hire, Inspire and Fuel Their Fire.  www.Mikekerr.com

Michael Kerr

The post Curtailing the Constant Complainers in Your Life: How to Turn Complainers Into Explainers appeared first on Your Better Life.

At the beginning of the week try to think of one thing that you are excited about. This excitement can help you work through all the things that bring you dread.

Kathy Watson

The post Get eXcited! appeared first on Your Better Life.

Your coworkers benefit from the attitudes of those around them. Share a positive attitude with your coworkers. Having a more positive attitude can help you and others feel better about whatever is going on in life at the time.

Kathy Watson

The post Uplift your coworkers appeared first on Your Better Life.

Following on the heels of my appearance article, and in a number of my talks, I’m confronted by people who seem to think that, because I’m suggesting that you care about your appearance, I’m also suggesting that you need to be someone you are not. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Before anything else, you must always remember to Be Yourself.

In my programs, I’ve developed a 7-step approach to leveling up, called In the Key of C – 7 Steps to the C-Suite (Or Anywhere Else You Want to Go). For those of you not in the corporate world, the C-Suite is the place where decisions get made by the CEO (Chief Executive Officer), CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and other Cs such as the COO (Chief Operating Officer) and other designations as needed by the company in question. The buck stops there, so the people in charge necessarily need to be good leaders and leaders cannot be good if they aren’t playing to their strengths.

The first of the Cs is Core, which is all about uncovering your key attributes and understanding how they’re serving you or being overused. Who are you at your core? What this means is that you need to have enough self-awareness, seek enough feedback and be courageous enough to look for all the ways you’re unique and all the ways you can uncover and leverage those strengths.

What do people always say about you? Is there a common thread running through their feedback?

You might be called bossy, then be called direct, then be called challenging and then be called headstrong or determined as you grew older. All those words speak to having a gift for direction, which is a good trait to build on if you want to lead. Conversely, if you’re called shy or retiring, your strength might be your introversion, your ability to think quietly and thoroughly about something, which is a great trait for researchers or analysts. Building on your strengths not only builds your confidence but also acts as a great method for getting into work that inspires you.

What do you find inspirational or appealing? Is there a common thread?

Let’s say you love all kinds of sports and what you love is the pursuit of excellence. You are inspired by the amazing feats of athletic prowess and the pulling together of the team. The things you are can often be found in the things you enjoy and can be examined to find out what it is you value. Once you understand your values, you can make your decisions based on them. Value teamwork? What kind of leader might you be, based on that?

Once you know who you are and what you value, you can work on making sure your appearance reflects it. Always BE YOURSELF.

Katherine Lazaruk

The post You Have to BE YOURSELF appeared first on Your Better Life.

I’ve got good news for you. 15 per cent of your success is based on your skill set. The bad news is no one sees your knowledge, skills and abilities when you walk through the door. What are you doing to maximize the 85 per cent of your success that is based on your presence?

Perhaps this isn’t something you’ve considered. Perhaps you struggle with the idea that your appearance could, would or should have any bearing at all on your success. I know I did when I first got into the image industry and I initially actively rebelled, wearing things that were very unique, unstructured and frankly, a little sloppy. I believed that I would attract business from people who were rebels, who didn’t want to care about what other people thought and who were most interested in showing their true selves to the world.

While I did do a fair amount of business working with these wonderful and unique individuals and getting great results for them around their self-expression and showing up as who they really were, I wasn’t really acknowledging one of the most important facts about the way our world (and our brain) works.

We don’t live in a vacuum

People, whether they’re meeting us for the first time or the hundredth time, have expectations of what we will look like based on what they know about us. If you’re a banker and show up to a multimillion-dollar meeting in sweats and trainers, you’re causing the people in the room to stop and wonder why it is you don’t show up the way they expected. While they’re spending all that time wondering, they’re not listening to you.

It’s not their fault. We’re all wired to make quick decisions, it’s what keeps us alive. Even if our rational frontal cortex is busy saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, the limbic brain is busy making decisions and slotting all the people we meet into the boxes framed up by our previous experience and education. Everyone’s boxes are unique, but not so much that you can appear way out of them and expect to be taken seriously.

Whether it’s for a promotion, a product sale, a career change or a date, whether you like it or not, your appearance matters. Here’s how to leverage yours:

1. Fit it and forget it. Make sure that what you’re putting on fits you on every level (physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially) and then you won’t have to worry about it. How you show up will make sense to people and they’ll have way more brain space to listen to your great ideas, thoughts and comments.

2. Care for yourself, care for others. Though many people eschew personal care, not believing its value, the recent research shows that what you put on your body affects the way you think. You are deserving of detailed care of every inch of your valuable self and caring for your appearance reflects how you might care for others. It’s also a subconscious confidence boost, which supercharges your social interactions.

3. Get honest, get feedback. We will never experience ourselves the way others see us. Even when we see ourselves on video or hear ourselves on a recording, our energy and essence is still being translated through a digital medium. The only way for us to gauge how our presence is coming across is to evaluate the results. How are our interactions going? Are we well-received or not?

Personally, getting help from a colleague was one of the best things I could have done when I got stuck in an overly casual, overly comfortable, somewhat messy look. She helped me see that by staying so comfortable and conforming a bit to Vancouver’s casual look, I was denying the part of myself that loves to look great and be creative with my style, the part that likes things to be finished, with a high level of attention to detail. Her feedback helped me see my blind spot and over the next year or so, I adjusted my course and sleeked up. I feel powerful, courageous and fierce, in a way that I never could have before. And my business has doubled.

What comes up for you when you read this? Stunned? Shocked? Annoyed? Excited? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Katherine Lazaruk

The post Your Appearance Matters – How to Make the Most of Your Executive Presence appeared first on Your Better Life.

Thank you Michael “Pinball” Clemons for delivering an inspiring speech and helping Tom hold that heavy award!

We can’t believe it’s been a year already since Tom Watson won the Inaugural SOS International Foster Award! Being the first to win an award so prestigious and personal is not only an honour but a privilege. The foster care system (though not perfect) is vital for our future kids who need a home to help them grow and succeed. Being a foster child that has overcome the odds by not only staying off the streets but having a family and business. Tom volunteers his time for those in need so it’s no wonder he was praised by Princess Salimah Aga Khan (whom invited Tom for dinner when she was in Vancouver!) the Dali Lama , Justin Trudeau , Angelina Jolie and many, many more!

Congrats Tom and keep up the amazing work of being you!

Daniela Butcura

The post Time fly’s when you’re helping others appeared first on Your Better Life.

Study after study has found that social support is key when it comes to fighting stress and staying happy. And when it comes to the role of humor, there’s a critically important chicken and egg relationship. Sharing a positive sense of humor helps make you more approachable and likeable, which helps you build and maintain a thriving social network, whether at work or at home. Conversely, the more social interaction you have the easier it is to find and generate more humor in your life.

According to Robert R. Provine, author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, “Laughter is the quintessential human social signal. Laughter is about relationships.”

Provine’s research found that people laugh 30 times more often when they are around other people than when they are alone! So the next time you are feeling stressed out take a cue from the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, but instead of using a lifeline, use a “laugh-life” by phoning a friend who you know will make you laugh and help you find the humor in a difficult situation.

A study of 1,648 students at Harvard, conducted by Shawn Achor, Phil Stone and Tal Ben-Shahar, also found that social support was by far the strongest predictor of happiness during stressful times. But here’s the really interesting piece of the study: What was most important in terms of sustained happiness wasn’t the level of social support the students received, it was how much social support they offered and provided for others.

In work situations, the study showed that social providers – people who initiate office activities, pick up the slack, or invite people to lunch – were 10 times more likely to be engaged in their work and 40 per cent more likely to receive a promotion!

And as always, small things can make a big difference when it comes to boosting social support. The Ochsner Health System found positive results in their work environment and in-patient satisfaction scores by instituting a very simple program to boost social support called the “10/5 Way”. When employees walk within 10 feet of another person at the hospital they must make eye contact and smile. When they walk within 5 feet, they must say hello. Yes, it’s ridiculously simple, yet it’s still surprisingly effective.

Michael Kerr

The post Social Support is the Key to Staying Happy, Fighting Stress and Finding the Funny in Life appeared first on Your Better Life.

LinkedIn Not Working for You? Improve Your Profile in Five Easy Steps!

Getting to be a Rockstar on LinkedIn is a lot easier when you show up well and it starts with having a good profile. More people than ever are searching for jobs and qualified people on LinkedIn and getting connected to professional opportunities and you want to make sure you’re seen.

You’re already set up, but how do you make yourself stand out? Try these tips to improve your visibility and you’ll see.

1. Complete your profile. This might seem self-evident, but there are a ton of profiles on LinkedIn that don’t have a picture, don’t have experience or education listed, don’t have interests and don’t have a headline or title or much of anything at all. It’s not enough to be on the platform. You need to do something with it. Make sure all the sections are complete. Make sure your headline is a short, punchy description of you and not a long-winded description of what you do. Put your sections in order by dragging and dropping them where you’d like them to show up. If you feel overwhelmed by the task, assign yourself a section at a time until it’s done.

2. Make sure your profile picture and banner are professional. Get a headshot done, instead of taking a selfie and thinking that’s enough. A professional photographer will get a good angle and will know what will read well on social media, as well as the proper size for an imported picture. On the banner behind your profile pic, find a picture (istock.com, shutterstock.com, or company header) that’s in a landscape format and related to your profession. Upload it and use it as your banner – make sure it looks good on a desktop and a mobile device as your headshot is on the left in the desktop version and in the centre on a mobile device. Any print or other graphics might interfere as the main picture shifts.

3. Ask for endorsements. Once you’ve completed your profile, including your skills and interests, you can ask your connections to endorse you. From there, you can move your skills and interests around by clicking the edit pencil in the top right corner of the section and pinning your top skills to the head of the list. If you want to delete one, you have to ‘un-pin’ it by selecting it and then dragging and dropping another one into the section. Ideally, the skills you are most wanting to use would be the ones you’d ask for endorsements for and that you’d have pinned.

4. Get active on the platform. Choose some groups and people to follow, like, share and comment on posts you enjoy, message people with whom you’d like to connect and start finding useful articles from your profession that you can post.

5. Edit, edit, edit. When you do something different or new, or unusual, add it to your experience or change up your headline. Your professional life isn’t static, and your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t be, either. Keep it fresh, keep it relevant and get connected.

Let us know how these tips worked for you, share a comment below.

Katherine Lazaruk

The post Tips for Maximizing Your LinkedIn Profile appeared first on Your Better Life.