More By: Laura

Building Success Through Determination

Building Success Through Determination

Do you find yourself creating goals and then abandoning them before they come to fruition? Do you often give up after the first few tries when learning something new? If so, this may seem like a normal reaction when you feel defeated by something. You may even say to yourself: “I’m just not good at this”. But what if you realized that the frustration was a normal part of the process? Would you keep moving along towards your goal?

W.S. Howell, author of The Empathetic Communicator, created a theory that helps explain how, when, and why we become competent at something. [...]

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Small Steps Equal Big Results

Small Steps Equal Big Results

     My blog last week was about the knowing-doing gap, knowing what you need to do to accomplish your goals, but getting stuck in the “doing”. I gave some suggestions of how to find your way out of that gap. In writing that blog, something funny happened: I realized I was in middle of the knowing –doing gap myself.

     I had a programmer create a temporary website for my business to serve as a basic informational and contact website until I finished designing the layout of my permanent website. Since I set that temporary site up, I have been caught [...]

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Feeling Stuck? Tips For Achieving Goals

Feeling Stuck? Tips For Achieving Goals

I often encounter clients who claim they know what they want to accomplish with their lives and/or careers, but when it comes to buckling down and doing it, they are paralyzed. It’s not enough to just know what you want; you have to figure out a way to get it done. This is where many people fall short when setting goals. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. We all find ourselves stuck in that place at certain points in our lives.

     So the question becomes: How do you push through it? In their book, “The Knowing Doing Gap: [...]

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Add Luck To Your Career Action Plan

Add Luck To Your Career Action Plan

I had an interesting session with a client this week. He is at the very beginning stages of figuring out what his next career will be. He had all kinds of stories about why several careers he had considered in the past would not have worked. There were stories of low pay, no recognition of effort, no security, too many hours, and no upward mobility. These factors are definitely valid issues in many jobs, but this client used these factors as limitations. It was as if he put every job on a balance sheet and mathematically weighed the pros and [...]

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Building Partnerships for Success

Building Partnerships for Success

     This week I found myself thinking about the power of making connections with people. In last week’s blog, I mentioned creating your own support system, the people you want on your side for guidance in your career journey. Hopefully, you are starting to see who should be on your side to help you through all the tough decisions. You also need to find the partners who can redirect the curveball that’s been thrown at your latest career endeavor.

     I was reminded of this when I saw an interview with the two founders of a technology company. They were [...]

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Are You Surrounding Yourself With The Right People?

Are You Surrounding Yourself With The Right People?

Sometimes you have to do some personal housekeeping to get your career on track for success. By personal housekeeping I mean examine the people you are surrounding yourself with. Are they supporting or discouraging you in meeting your goals? Do they respond like a resource or a deterrent when you look to them for advice on meeting your goals or overcoming obstacles?

     If you are seeing a pattern in your answers to the above questions, you need to start focusing your attention on people who can give you the support you need, even if they are imaginary. This doesn’t mean [...]

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Are You Limiting Your Ability To Succeed?

Are You Limiting Your Ability To Succeed?

     If you have been reading this blog for the last few weeks you may be practicing some mental fitness; getting all of your strengths in line, creating your vision of an ideal life, starting to create the formula that will move you along to the next best thing in your life. You may see it all so clearly and feel that you can achieve it, but it’s not happening. You may not be acting on your plans or acting on them in a way that is not productive to your end goal. It may just be that your limiting [...]

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Self-Mastery: How To Be Resilient In The Workplace

Self-Mastery: How To Be Resilient In The Workplace

     Do you have self-mastery? Self-mastery means that you feel competent to make your way in the world knowing you can handle yourself in varied situations. It comes from strengthening your social and emotional skills. If you don’t have it, don’t worry. I didn’t either, it’s not something you are born with, it’s something we all can and need to learn.

     In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, PhD has studies that show when children are told they’re brilliant, they start looking at effort as a sign of inadequacy, thereby causing emotional stress. When things get [...]

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Creating a Vision For A Successful Career

Creating a Vision For A Successful Career

I’ve been blogging a lot about getting to know your strengths and weaknesses and starting to see how they are working for you in your current career and personal life. Hopefully, you have gained some insight into where your abilities can take you. Now, it’s time to evaluate your vision, and I don’t mean your eyesight. I was reminded of how vision helps people accomplish their goals when I watched a show I love that focuses on adventure sports like rock climbing, parachuting, and snowboarding. This particular episode showed a skier doing some kind of double, back flip twist over a high [...]

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The Key To Success: Defining Your Strengths

The Key To Success: Defining Your Strengths

In the last blog I discussed that finding your essential self and strengths can help you in choosing a better career path and building a better life. Some of you may be still trying to figure out how this fits into the big picture. For others it may seem like a daunting task. But the truth is, it’s easy to find yourself.

Marcus Buckingham, the author of Go Put Your Strengths To Work, helps individuals identify their strengths. He then helps them create lives and careers that suit these strengths. I was reading his blog the other day and [...]

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