Motivation: Find it and Leverage it…

Motivation is the source of energy that not only get things done, but also done with great success. If you can find it and sustain it, I am sure you are on your way to success! It is so powerful that nothing can stop in your way, what’s impossible has become possible with motivation. All you need to know is how to find it, and make full use of it.

Passion is the word

Yes. Doing things you love is a sure way to find motivation right? It creates excitement and the feeling to quickly get it done. Have you encounter an occasion where you just can’t fell asleep, knowing tomorrow you are off on an exciting holiday? Yes! You feel excited and your body has already started preparing even the night before!

If you are looking for motivation in your work, you will probably need to ask yourself if this is the job you love? Most successful workers are highly motivated at work. Why? Simply because they are doing what they love! Work is no longer work, it is their passion their play. They are so happy to spend their entire weekend and burn through their night to work. If you don’t feel that energy, even part of it, then probably you are not doing something you love.

So knowing what you love and how it motivates you is the first step to success. Donald Trump does not feel motivated over the heap of money coming in, it is the work he is into, his passion to close deals and create new incomes. The amount of money coming in is just an indicator of how successful he is now.

Your past successes can be fuel for your motivation

Have you heard about the circle of success? When someone has been successful in what he did, he will find the energy and motivation to do it again. Simply because he truly believe in it. These are proofs that you can be successful again. If you have successfully make $10 from selling an apple, do you believe that you can do it again and get the same result? Yes. You have done it and proved it!

Going further, you can even leverage on someone else’s success stories too! If they can do it, so can you! This create possibilities and believing you can create the same thing, you will find motivation! If Edmund Hillary can reach the top of Everest, so can many others, who have done it shortly after Edmund succeeded.

So find out more about others’ success stories, and you can find motivation there.

Set challenges for yourself

Setting challenges is another way to create motivation. Set yourself some easy to accomplish goals, and see for yourself. Goal after goal, you will unknowingly accomplished a difficult task! A good way is to write them out and display them at a prominent place and everyday remind yourself of these goals.

The Very Best of April 2013

Over the month of April, I have received many emails requesting for certain personal development topics. I am starting to understand more about what are the topics and related issues that you might be interested in. And that itself gave me a great deal of motivation and energy, to write better articles and interesting topics that my readers really love. Keep those emails coming!

April is a great month, we have well over 2000 reads and audience come from all over the world, majority are from the US and Singapore and we are seeing more from Europe and Asia. Here are the top 3 articles in April:

#3: How to ask for a salary increment, this article talk about the necessary steps to effective negotiation for a salary increment. One of the hardest question to ask, but with good research and planning, you will be able to negotiate better, understand how much you are worth and plan out a good strategy approaching this topic to your boss.

#2: Controlling your state of mind, a great technique to program your mind to work the way you wanted to. By creating anchors, you will be able to enter the state you desired. Not only for better performance or motivation, it also helps to manage your emotions effectively. Anchors are powerful, as these are one of the key tools in very highly successful individuals. =

#1: What do you see in this picture? One of the most interesting article adapted from an ancient Chinese philosophy, we tend to focus too much on certain, obvious things and neglected a lot of other things that might have made the difference. Bad things happen and we remembered our entire lifetime, and we do not remembered the good things that happened during those times. We classify someone as a bad guy for one or two bad deeds done and forgetting the wonderful good deeds done. So broaden your perspective and look around you, before you conclude whether it is good or bad!

May is coming fast and the blog is going on the 3rd month soon. Thanks for all your support, and as promised, I will probably launched the ebook that I have prepared for you, absolutely free! Stay tuned and feel free to let me know if you are interested in certain topics!

Thanks!

Richmond

Founder – Dream Turners

5 Great ways to make better use of your time at work

Almost 70% of our time at work are really non-productive work. Clearing emails, answering phone calls and document housekeeping add little or no value to your work. If we can increase our time to do productive work, we can contribute a lot of value to our companies. A lot really means two to five times more, and the best thing is that achieving such increase in value does not mean you will need to spend the equivalent amount of time at work! Here are five great ways to start thinking of how you can better use your work time.

Review work-life boundaries.

Almost everyone is talking about work-life balance. How to segregate and dedicate time for ourselves, spending some quality time with family and friends. Yes this is important but don’t limit yourself to a strict rigid quarantine at work. Instead of trying to squeeze yourself into the 8 to 9 hours of office hours and adjust your lifestyle to fit into this clockwork, why not try to blur the boundaries between work and leisure times?

Most successful workers are more productive with living in a single “life”, not “work life” and “personal life”. Accommodate your emotions and feelings, and do work as and when you feel it is needed. Soon enough, you will see that in fact more productive work are done! If you feel like doing up some slides or presentation after dinner, do it. If you want to come to work early just to avoid the jams in the city, grab your stuff go to work. The idea is not to force yourself to work and productive work are usually done when you are feeling good.

Yes. There will be deadlines and rigid office hours. But always try to strike a balance, you will find that time expands tremendously that way. Work-life balance is still important but don’t just look at a daily balance, but a larger perspective like over a week or month.

Full use of To-Do Lists to create momentum

To-do lists are forgotten tools that help us manage our work. Not only that, it also give us a great sense of accomplishments when we ticked off our lists! The ideal use of these lists is to include personal and work to-do lists, again blurring the boundaries between work and leisure. And they best thing is, most likely a digital version is already available in your laptop! Outlook, Mac calendar, Google Calendar are great tools available.

Outsource your work

Outsourcing your work? No kidding, that’s where secretaries come in for bosses right? You don’t need secretaries to help you out with it. In fact some work are better off done by your fellow colleagues, they are more familiar, faster and efficient in their own ways. Of course you should be able to help them out with your own set of skills you have. You don’t have to know everything, but you need to know everything that others might be better. Leverage your time and do things that you are fast and good at it. If you are really busy and you see that you can triple your value at work, why not talk to your boss and consider getting an assistant, which might cost less than the value you can contribute. I bet your boss would say yes!

Reinvent your way of doing work

There are sure better ways to do some of your work. Many times, work can be quickly done through a different set of processes. Eliminate redundant steps or reduce manual work is a great way to improve efficiency. Learn some quick excel macros that can quickly help you out with the manual manipulations and calculations that you had to do manually previously. Try doing process maps too. Complicated work that involves lots of stakeholders can be easily refined into efficient processes and hence reducing non-productive time, allowing you more time to focus on productive work!

Great resources that I personally read and to all of you who feel you can do more at work, try these, I am sure it helped you as much as they helped me:

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
• Getting Things Done: A Time Saving Summary of David Allen's Book on Productivity
• The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play

 

     

How to ask for a salary increment

This is a sensitive topic that many employees and bosses face. So today, let me share with you some tactical and strategic tips that will help you to secure the increment you wanted.

Have you been working really hard and staying back at work just to get things done? Or do you feel that you should be getting more than what you are currently getting, especially when your colleagues are getting more than you do? Well, there are several ways to go about it. You can patiently wait to get noticed by your boss and then propose an increment, but likely the chances are that you wont succeed. You need something else, a plan to build a strong case on why you deserve a pay increment. Put yourself in the shoes of your boss and start planning that way.

Determine your market worth

First, you need to do some research of what the industry is paying for similar job roles as yours. There are great websites on current market salaries, other resources can be newspaper cuttings, magazines, newsletters and even employment advertisements. Not only these, you might want to talk to people with similar job scope or discuss with executive search firms to find out your market worth.

You need a strong case

That’s the main part of your plan, a strategy and a series of justification on why you deserve an increment. Sell yourself like you would during your first interview, highlight your achievements throughout your time with the company and also include your past experience in other companies. Justify it with your performance and contributions to the company. The main idea here is to show how much value you have contributed to the company.Articulate your commitment and be ready to take new responsibilities and projects, sometimes even a change in job scope.

Learn the art of negotiation

Be realistic, and always think in the shoes of your boss and company. Sometimes, it is not that bosses don’t want to increase your salary, but due to limitations of the company. So always keep an open mind and be flexible to other forms of compensation and benefits. Depending on what motivates you, you can request for other perks that will make you as happy as a pay increment! It can be monetary of non-monetary like, working from home, travel opportunities, course sponsorship or even more leave for longer weekends!

Be professional

No matter how the negotiation goes, always keep a positive attitude and let your bosses know that you appreciate all the effort put in. It may not be that you are worthy for a pay raise, but sometimes due to market limitations and company’s performance. Always be ready for the next negotiation when the environment changes. Keep a record of your achievements and don’t be too pushy about it.

Keep your work simple

Keeping things simple may sound easy at first. But in actual fact, simplicity is one of the toughest things to achieve and maintain! Many things in our lives will complicate over time naturally. It is how we handle these changes and tweak around to ensure we maintain simple things. But in short “Simplicity is not as simple as it is”!

Simplicity is one of sought after principles at work.

Simplicity actually means a lot at work. Being simple and straight to the point, you can help your company to save millions of dollars and investing too much time working on complex issues. Why simple things are more valuable than complex things? Because simple things are easy to understand, not understanding yourself, but anyone else! Customers don’t have to spend hours trying to figure out what you are trying to say, and your team mates can easily support your project or take over work from you without any loss of knowledge or information. Bosses are happy and very clear of your projects and achievements. Isn’t that great? It is so much better than creating an extremely powerful but complex system that you are proud of but no one else know how to use it!

Here are some ways to add simplicity in your work:

• Work with an end in your mind. It is very similar to creating vision and goals. If you are clear of how your product or presentation slides look like at the end, you will know how to achieve that. “Reverse engineer” your way back to the basics. This way will help you to be focus on your end-state and not stray away from your focus, ending up creating complex solutions that can be solved easily.
• Eliminate redundancy. Redundancy is one of the main contributors to complexity. Set yourselves various checkpoints, where you actually stop working and review what you have done. Eliminate any redundancy if necessary. Sometimes we tend to add a lot details, just to make it clear but at many times things can be intuitive enough to be understood without further details.
• Think and work in the shoes of your audience. Another important principle of simplicity. It means easy to use, easy to understand. Always ask yourself why are you including these details? Does it help my audience to understand? Do they need to know before they can make any decision or take action? The best way is to get someone to read through your documents or use your product and give you feedback on it. Knowing what they want, you will be able to eliminate a lot of the complexity from your work.
• Let others do the “dirty work”. At many times, things cannot be that simple. It simply just cannot be eliminated and yet everything look too complex. A great way to deal with that is to redirect or delegate something to solve the complexity, so your audience or customers don’t have to deal with the complexity that will put them away. Automate things that can be automated through simple excel formulas, instead of having the customers to put in a formula and values, why not create something really simple that they have just to fill in the necessary values and let the program do the dirty work? Simplicity in this case is enhancing user experience which is one of the most important aspect in product design or process design.

Over time, you can expect to lose simplicity. It is a natural process where things complicate when they age. New things pop up and taken care of, quick fix or enhancements needed etc. So constantly review and decide if a “simplification” is needed. I bet if you can make it a point to make things simple, others will be impressed by your work! Many others tend to just to get things done and move on, but being able to spend a little bit more thought and work, you make a quantum difference that distinguishes yourself from the rest.

       

 

Here are some great resources that worth investing your time in:

• Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity
• Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success
• Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

What do you see in this picture?

So what do you see in this picture? “A black dot.” Or “A black circle” is the common answer from 99% of the people. But if you broaden your perspective and look around the entire picture, do you see something bigger than the black dot? Yes! The white space! The white space take up about 90% of the entire picture yet most of us see the black 10%. We have narrow our focus on the dot and we pay a lot more attention than the white space.

This actually applies in our daily life, we might be talking bad of someone and we hated that person. But looking broader, we might have neglected and overlooked the good deeds he or she had done. Most of the time, we are too quick to judge someone, either through impulse or heated moments. So take a step back and you may see more about that person.

Another good example is weather forecast. Weather forecast reports every single day and yet we did not praise them of their accurate forecasts and hard work they have put in behind the scenes. But when one day the weather forecast report was not accurate, we start to complain and whine about it.

There are many things that we have taken them for granted. We have overlooked a lot of details and neglected 90% of the things around it. But if we can think about it and appreciate the entire picture, our life will be so much interesting!

Start to “see more” today, and you will agree that  “ Life’s not too bad after all!”

Richmond

Dream Turners

How to get someone to do anything for you…

Do you believe that you have the power and ability to get someone to do things that you want them to do? Yes! If you apply the right skills and the right message, they will work for you! The technique is a secret tool, or rather something that is subtle and require some analysis to bring our the characteristics of this existence of the secret technique.

You can easily find numerous books on persuasion and influence people, and they all have their own views and analysis of effective persuasion and influence. I stumbled upon a book that sums all up and put everything right in place. The book, Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition) pieces the puzzle altogether. The book introduces the six “weapons of influence”. These are power techniques that can be so powerful that you can get people to do anything.

Consistency and Commitment. Another principle observe in almost everyday life. People can be conditioned that a certain belief is true or convinced about your opinions and in turn build their own.Once people start believing, they are committed to them and doing things consistently that relate back to their beliefs and commitment.

The Law of Reciprocity. This is a common technique you see in marketing, where companies give out free samples, trial periods of their products and know that people will come back and purchase the product, sometimes just to return the favor. It is also a form of human behavior, which build trust and relationships.

Social Proof. One of the strongest methodologies in social behavior. Simple way to describe it will be m=”monkey see, monkey do.” In many social activities when people faced uncertainties or doubts on anything, they tend to follow those who have been done it before and follow the crowd. You can observe this behavior from many marketing plans where they talk about positive experience or reviews and show videos or pictures of people using the product. Or when everyone is using the same mobile phone and others will tend to think that phone is one of the best and will eventually get one for themselves.

Scarcity. Another word that bears the same meaning “Exclusive”. People tend to do things when those things are exclusive. It can be either Time scarcity, “Limited time offer!” or Quantity scarcity which is like “2 left!” or “limited edition! 5 in the whole world” Marketers used this technique frequently as they work like magic on its own.

Liking. People tend to do things that they like, right? Same goes for anything, you tend to be easily influenced or believed in people you like. So if you can make yourself “likeable”, it will be easier to influence other people!

Authority. People tend to be believe in people of higher authority. Like you will trust professionals in their own fields. Like advertisements showing doctors and dentists promoting products, people tend to buy these recommended products. But in actual fact, these “doctors” or “dentists” are just actors!

With this six weapons of influence, I am sure you can get more out of it from other people!

This book, Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition) is available in Amazon through this link. Author of this book, Robert Cialdini is a renowned psychologists in the field of influence and persuasion. Do get one and find out more of the concepts and ways to persuade and influence others!

Related books:

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)
• How To Win Friends and Influence People Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
• Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others