Strategic Leadership Coaching

Expanding Your LinkedIn Network

Strategic Leadership Coaching presents LinkedIn Quick Tips with Robb Pardee.  Robb has spoken to hundreds of people at companies and professional organizations on the subject of Leveraging LinkedIn for personal branding, business development, and career search.  In this video Robb shares four easy ways to grow your network on LinkedIn.

 

LinkedIn Resources for DMA Insert Media Day

If you attended the DMA Insert Media Day 2011 and heard me speak on Leveraging LinkedIn please download these two resources.  The LinkedIn Business Development Checklist is a great reminder of some of the points that I stressed in my talk on using LinkedIn to develop your personal brand and grow your business.  The second is a short list of resources to help you develop new skills to Leverage  LinkedIn.

Download LinkedIn Bus Dev Checklist

Download LinkedIn Resources

These two resources will only be available for a limited time so download them today.

Writing a SMART Resume for 2011

A SMART resume is the way to avoid the ambiguity trap of overused buzzwords and make your resume stand out to hiring managers.

• Specific – Your resume should be as specific as possible when it comes to your skills and experience.  Use keywords that are meaningful to the job you are seeking and highlight your competencies.
• Measurable – If you can quantify an accomplishment from your work history do so.  Including meaningful data in your resume creates a context that allows recruiters to contrast you with other candidates.  So for example, if you “increased sales by $1 million” make sure you mention that.
• Achievement – Focus your bullet points on things you have accomplished or problems you have solved rather than your general responsibilities.  In particular, highlight achievements that are relevant to the job you are seeking.
• Readable – Be as clear and concise as possible when writing your highlights.  Generic buzzwords decrease readability because your reader gets bored. You aren’t telling them anything useful.  Make sure to read your resume out loud before you send it.
• True – Avoid the temptation to inflate your experience.  Social networks like LinkedIn make it easier than ever for a potential employer to verify your claims.  Try and match your resume and online profile as much as possible to convey a consistent brand message.

 Put these simple tips into practice to start your 2011 resume makeover.

HIGHLANDS FORUM - Anxiety, Career Choice and Aptitudes! What's a "Quarter-lifer" to do?

Do you know any Quarterlifers struggling to establish themselves?

From: http://ping.fm/Op1IC

Work Life Balance: heavy on the "yes" side but light on the "no" side

I don't really care for the term work life balance; mainly because it implies that there is some magic formula that will suddenly bring peace, balance, and harmony to your chaotic life.  I have not met anyone so far who has found this secret formula.  The underlying assumption of work life balance is that you can do and have it all at once.  Right now you should be enjoying a satisfying career, a full family life, and a hobby you love or so the message goes.  Nothing in life really works that way though. We have been fooled by our consumer culture that life will be happier if we just ___ fill in the blank.  We keep trying to fill in that blank with a wider range of things placing more and more on the scales of work life balance.  The reality is that good things, things really worth having or achieving, almost always involve sacrifice and deliberate focus.  Intentional planning is involved to determine the sequence of the small steps taken to move one closer to a goal.  This contradicts what most mean by work life balance today. 

 

Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, recently said, "There's no such thing as work-life balance, there are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."  So the skill to learn here is, understanding our choices and the consequences they may have.  We need to say "no" to a great many things and "yes" to only those things that refine our focus on what is important.  The Olympic athlete says "no" to all of the choices that take her away from training.  And she really only says "yes" to the training and short term pain it brings to move her toward her long term goal.  The limiting, in the short run is worth the long term end gain.  That is what we need in life, to limit or say "no" to the choices that are not important to us or take us away from our end goal.  So we need to get into training and strengthen our ability to say "no".  What makes it hard for you to say "no" to those things that are not important to you or do not move you toward your goal?

The Myth of Multitasking

Have you been taken hostage by the myth of multitasking. Everything in our technology driven culture pushes us to multitask with the promise that "you will get more done and be more productive". Well to quote Dr. Clifford Nass from Stanford, "It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task to another." Dr. Nass has been researching how multitasking works in the human brain and his findings pretty much go against the conventional wisdom of our day. I talk with clients all the time that are overwhelmed by the constant barrage of digital messages from all fronts. Well its time to take action and get some control back in your life by exploring the power of focus. Put some fences around your time and space particularly if you have a project to get done. You can do this by blocking out chunk of uninterrupted and undistracted time on your schedule. Then turn off your email, TV, and smart-phone for an entire hour and see how much you can get done on one specific task. Let me know if you see any difference in the quality of your work.

If you would like to read more about the research being done at Stanford you can read the full Frontline interview here.