Even though they can’t quite identify it, hints and clues are everywhere in our conversation, and I can often cut straight to the issue.

I like to compare it to a professional tennis player whose serve just isn’t quite right. He keeps diligently working to achieve success—to gain the right speed, to strike the ball at the perfect, sweet spot on the racquet–but he can’t figure it out. An expert coach observes him and, from seeing his serve from a different perspective, she understands what needs to be done. The coach talks with him about making one the needed adjustment. It can be as simple as a different tilt of the wrist.

Coaching of any kind has a funny way of helping us shift our perspective. It is a tool that helps us see our situation with fresh eyes.

Even though your personal diligence is essential, the benefit gained from the insights of a neutral, outside observer can go a long way towards helping you shift your perspective.

To get the most power out of your new insights:

1.) Stay open! Gaining new insights into your career or education might feel overwhelming and exhilarating at the same time.

2.) Give yourself time to think. Carefully weigh the thoughts of your trusted advocates.

3.) Go with your gut. Our instincts are almost always right, yet we don’t trust them enough.

4.) Realize that big change can happen quickly. Making up your mind is a powerful act.

As an experienced coach, I love partnering with people who are ready to get “unstuck” from their current challenges. To ask questions or make an appointment for a complementary initial session, call 804.288.0099 or 804.869.5403.

Here are a few ideas to help you navigate and anticipate the risks to look out for as your business grows:

•Think through the downside of your decisions. This can be easy to figure out by comparing your business model to one that is already out there.  Look at the decisions made by businesses using your model.  Try to stay detached and objective in your comparisons.

•Be deliberate about modeling your business after one that’s growing. There are very few new things in our world, and modeling your business after one with steady growth can help you avoid the pitfalls of other business models.

•Watch for the challenges that come with fast growth. Often there is more risk in a business that is growing quickly than a business that it growing slowly.  It is much harder to manage a fast-growing business.  It can even be hard to imagine how large the business might become and build the business accordingly.

•Have the right people in place. Make sure your staff are well-trained and ready for what might be thrown their way.  The risk is not being able to predict the outcomes.

The best risk-assessment tool for entrepreneurs is having people in your organization or “by your side” with a variety of backgrounds who can help you with business analyst.  Having somehone help you understand what might trip you up as the business speeds ahead can be invaluable.

If you’d like a partner in assessing your risks and some guidance on gathering your all-star team, I’d be glad to talk with you.  To ask questions or make an appointment for a complementary initial session, call 804.288.0099 or 804.869.5403.

American workers are not happy in their jobs. More than half of American workers

Problems at work are more strongly associated with health complaints than are any other life stressor, more so than even financial or family problems.

The Symptoms

Work-related stress can cause emotional problems such as depression and anxiety but also
causes physical illness. Stress has direct effects on the skin (rashes, hives, atopic dermatitis), the gastrointestinal system (GERD, peptic ulcer, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis), and contributes to insomnia, headache, muscular tension, and backache and/or neck ache. Chronic, long-term stress may even increase your risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

Harmful Impact on Your Hormones

Stress engages the nervous system in the “fight or flight” response, a defense to threatening situations. Hormones are released to sharpen your senses, quicken your pulse, deepen respiration, and tense your muscles. Short-lived, infrequent episodes of stress pose little risk to your health but detrimental side effects to your health may occur when the stressful situation remains unresolved. For people under long-term stress at work, their bodies remain in a constant state of activation, increasing the wear and tear to biological systems. Your risk of physical illness increases over sustained periods of stress as your body is unable to repair itself.

The Hard Costs of Stress in the Workplace

Work related stress is a leading cause of employee absenteeism. Workers experiencing high stress are twice as likely to be absent more than five times per year.

Health care expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress. The cost of actively stressed-out, disengaged workers is estimated to be $370 billion to the U.S. economy per year in lost productivity.

While there are a number of causes of work-related stress, an often overlooked cause is the mismatch between the requirements of the job and the employee’s strengths. Job stress is experienced when working in a job that does not match your personality, talents, and strengths. The real problem may not be the workplace, but people working in jobs that they are not suited for.

Among the factors for feeling good about coming to work, two relate to the match between the worker and the job requirement or organization. People are happiest when they feel that the work they do in their job is meaningful and worthwhile and when they feel the organization is a good match for them. This means that people need to work in areas and for companies that draw on their unique strengths and talents in order to feel good about their job.

A recent survey conducted by The Conference Board found that worker satisfaction is at the lowest level since they began recording job satisfaction 22 years ago, with only 45% reporting job satisfaction.

Employees who are not satisfied in their work are not likely to be engaged while at work. Gallup estimates the number of extremely miserable employees who are “actively disengaged” to be 20 million, or 18% of the American workforce. Another 54% of the workforce is “not engaged”.

These numbers are alarming because disengaged workers are not as successful as their engaged colleagues leading to more unhappiness and more feelings of stress.

The current state of job dissatisfaction is often attributed to the economy which has produced mass layoffs, decreases in benefits and pay, and longer working hours with more job responsibility. But the downward trend in job satisfaction began long before the recession.

“Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend,” reported Lynn Franc, director of the Consumer Research Center of the Conference Board.

“You can choose what you do, you can’t choose what you like to do,” says Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project. Working in a job you don’t like is not going to make you happy and may make you sick. Maybe now is the time to choose a job that you like to do.

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Ready to lead a happy, healthier life? Make that shift today with results-oriented coaching – call Coach Carroll at 804.288.0099.

Get real about your inaction.

What you perceive as procrastination or inability to make decisions is often just the pesky process to work through.  Should you move forward?  Is it OK to take a step and risk making a mistake?

Sometimes, making a decision is about choosing between two good options.  How about taking one for now and choosing to pick up the other later?

Sometimes, we need to skip prioritizing and just take the first step.

To leave your brain uncluttered for the big decisions, why not eliminate some of the small ones?  When you find a great detergent or kitty litter, go with it.  Knowing what you want in advance will save you lots of time in the grocery and supply store.  Coupons and lots of different options are fun and creative, but don’t waste your creative energy in the grocery store!  Just use what you love and pare down your options.  Save your brain space for big decisions.

The same advice goes for household duties, volunteer work and hobbies.  Choose your activities based on what you love and where you excel, and there will be plenty of time for fun and family.  We’re all faced with the need and want to contribute to our communities.  If you are good at finance, volunteer to be on the finance committee at a local school, library, or not-for-profit group.

Eliminate small decisions where you can, and give yourself permission to take the first step towards making the big decisions you’re confronting.

As an experienced life coach, I’ve guided many people through the decision-making process.  I’d love to talk with you about your situation.  To ask questions or make an appointment for a complementary initial session, call  or 804.869.5403.

Career coaches work with clients who want to get their career into shape.   This is a collaborative relationship that arms clients with knowledge about themselves, the best route to achieve their goals and career results.

10 ways career coaches are similar to personal fitness trainers:

1.  Assessment

Career coaches will begin the relationship by assessing your strengths, talents, and skills just as personal fitness coaches watch your form and monitor your vitals to provide objective feedback about your limits and strengths.

2.     Motivation

One of the main reasons people benefit from a coach is to get motivation to stick with a consistent program. Career coaches provide structure and accountability, and encourage you to develop a path for success and balance in your work and personal lives. They will push you to stretch yourself harder than you would on your own or slow you down as necessary when you are losing focus.

3.     Individualized programs

Coaches work with their clients to design effective, personalized strategies to help the client achieve success and become happier, more peaceful, and more inspired. They will ask the hard questions and consider all of your needs including career goals, desired financial results, family life, exercise, diet, and fun.

4.     Efficiency

Career coaches help you create consistency in your objectives and stop wasting your time with inefficient pursuits. Your coach has a plan and will help you get maximum results in minimum time.

5.     Improve skills

The coach will help identify skills you may need to sharpen in order to stand out in your particular field. Coaches will incorporate skills training into your program so you improve not only your strengths but your mental focus.

6.     Starting your career

If you are a new college graduate a good coach will introduce you to very simple, effective strategies so before you know it, you have the confidence and knowledge to decide what is right for you in pursuit of your career goals.

7.     Break through plateaus

You are established in your career and everything has been going well for several years, but you feel stuck in a rut. A career coach is perfect for helping to jump start your work life by reassessing your goals and pushing you to the next level.

8.     Career change

If you ultimately want change the direction of your career or switch careers completely, hiring a career coach is an effective way to learn about yourself. Coaches challenge you to look at things differently and to re-evaluate your
assumptions, expectations, reactions, and beliefs about yourself and success. This re-evaluation process will enable you to pursue the career that will be most rewarding for you.

9.     Learn to do it alone

Some people seek out coaches to learn how to design and implement their own strategies for career growth and only need to hire a career coach for a few months. All good coaches will teach their clients the basics of building and modifying a career fitness program to achieve maximum results.

10.  Be successful

There is a good reason that the number one reason people hire personal trainers is to lose weight and get into shape—it works. The same is true for career coaching—it works. If you have resolved to get your career in shape, a career coach can keep you on track and help you realize that goal.

Ready to get your career in shape?  Take the first step with my complementary initial session. I can be reached at either 804.288.0099 or 804.869.5403.

With hundreds of thousands of people competing for the same jobs, reviewing applications and deciding on the best candidates can be an overwhelming and confusing process.

Don’t Band-Aid a Problem by Hiring

Before hiring someone new, ask: “Is everyone doing their job?  Is everyone on staff placed in the right position?”  Try to figure out what you can shift or change before hiring.

Get a Process in Place

The problem for most business owners, particularly small business owners, is that they don’t have a hiring process in place and don’t take enough time to hire the right people.

Using your intuition to hire the right person is great – but not until that person has been properly vetted through a process that you’ve predetermined is the right one for your business.  If you have two candidates who are relatively equal in skills and experience, then certainly, use your gut instincts on which one is best.

Approaching the recruitment process in an organized, purposeful way will help you make the right decisions and bring the right players onto your team. 

Think about the immediate future of the organization.  Make a “skills-needed” list.

Risk it on Over-qualified Candidates

Don’t be afraid to take a risk on people who are over-qualified.  I have hired many successful, loyal contributors who were over-qualified but perfect for the position.

Approaching the recruitment process in an organized, purposeful way will help you make the right decisions and bring the right players onto your team. 

Sorting through Applications

Recruitment can be done in three’s…if you find 150 resumes, you will have 50 good people.  Out of this group, if you phone screen nine people you will have three or four you definitely want to interview.  To keep from being overwhelmed, start with the top ten candidates in the resume pile, phone screen nine, interview three or four and commit to second and third interviews on at least two of them.

You could make a separate folder—both electronically and physically—for job applicants.  Whenever an e-mail from a candidate comes in, categorize it and file it immediately.  Otherwise, it will likely get lost amidst the deluge of everything else. 

But the better way is to only handle each resume once time—know what talents and skills you’re looking for, look for and find that top talent, and ignore the rest.

Consider hiring a business advisor or coach to help with this process. 

When I work with businesses on recruitment, I help them:

• Layout a recruitment strategy and hiring process
• Review job descriptions to make sure they’re reasonable and accurate
• Sort through resumes and narrow down candidate selections to 10 or fewer with interaction analysis
• Figure out if there are any special interests or talents that might make a candidate more valuable than another (i.e combined talents for music and math somehow go together so an accountant who also plays an instrument might make for a better candidate)
• Learn how to interview properly reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the candidate based on the job description

When looking for Help in Recruiting, Seek an Expert

 Any consultant or coach you consider should readily offer you a record of his or her performance.

 My recruiting experience includes the following:

•  20 administrative positions, salaries up to $25K
• 300 hourly operations contributors, salaries up to $30K
• 45 entry-level supervisors, salaries up to $35K
• 45  individual contributors, salaries up to $40K
• 25 managerial positions, salaries up to $50K
• 15+ vice president positions, range of salaries
• 40+ technology individual contributors, range of salaries

One of the companies I recruited for – Citigroup – received awards for “best recruiting project” as well as “no employee turnover in 2 years.”

If you’re ready for a unique and fresh approach to hiring the best talent for your business, call 804.288.0099.

Related articles

• How Do Companies Recruit Employees? (thinkup.waldenu.edu)

Whatever that thing is, chances are, it makes you happy.

An article in Scientific American talks about types of fast thinking.  The authors contrast fast, varied thinking with fast, repetitive thinking.  Going with the more varied approach makes people happier than with the repetitive approach (this kind of repetitive thinking is associated with obsessive compulsion). 

According to the article,

Results suggested that thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful.

Activities that promote fast thinking, then, such as whip­ping through an easy crossword puzzle or brain-storming quickly about an idea, can boost energy and mood, says psychologist Emily Pronin, the study’s lead author.

To read the full article about the benefits of fast thinking, head over to Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy 

So the next time you’re feeling a bit blue, just think fast.  Or play a game of blitz chess with a friend.

Similar pleasure can be experienced by listening to music with a fast tempo.  While studies don’t reach a consensus as to whether listening to music while you work makes you more or less productive, listening to music with a high number of beats per minute will certainly make you feel energize, and likely put you in a good mood, too. 

That’s because it helps you to engage your brain on a different level, just like it does when you think fast.

Studies about the benefits of fitness crop up all the time.  Exercise helps to prevent or mitigate heart disease and diabetes.  It can help people suffering from arthritis or cancer.  It may even contribute to deterring the progress of diseases like Alzheimers, as this recent article in The Oregonian discusses:  Aerobic Training Protects Brain Against Aging.

And still, the data doesn’t seem to click.  Dire warnings about future health conditions just aren’t good motivation to exercise and improve your physical fitness.  No amount of finger-waggling by phys-ed teachers seems to work.

Let’s think about the present instead.

It is a natural human tendency to ask the question:

“What can I do that will make my present moment richer, more full?”

Use the momentum of that question to help you explore and practice the benefits of fitness.  Whatever is good for our bodies is also (usually) good for our brains.

1. Flexible body, flexible mind.  Moving your body whether by walking, dancing, swimming or something else creates mobility in your mind.  Our brains are always continuing to adapt and learn, and they can follow the body’s lead in doing so.  As this study demonstrates learning new tricks creates new pathways in the brain—keeping it young and agile.
2. Relaxation for the body is relaxation for the brain: Exercise can create a necessary release valve for stress.  In the moment that you’re most amped up about a deadline or a project, taking five minutes to stretch or even walk a flight or two of stairs in your office building will help to diffuse that stress.  It will clear your brain and give you focus.
3. Play inspires creativity:  Skipping, dancing, joining a pick-up game of soccer.  When you do something playful, you relax.  And in a relaxed state, good ideas can flow.
4. Physical activity will boost your mood. With activity comes a rush of endorphins–those tingly, feel-good sensations.  They’ll make you feel brighter and more optimistic.  That alone will add strength and confidence to your work.
5. Movement increases oxygen levels to your brain.  It’s no accident that you might find yourself thinking more clearly about a problem or idea after a walk.  You’ve just given your brain a delicious infusion of oxygen.

The coaching process is highly specialized and geared towards each person’s individual needs and strengths.  My coaching sessions with one person might look completely different from my coaching sessions with someone else.

After nearly thirty years of using my coaching skills, however, I have noted a few hallmarks of good coaching (whether life coaching, business coaching, or ADHD coaching).

I’ll call these the Four Keys of Good Coaching

1. Good coaching is forward-thinking rather than backward-looking.  In our coaching sessions, we will focus our time and energy on the present and on the future.  It helps me to know a little bit about your background and your personal story, but we will not spend much time, if any, delving into your past.   Instead, we’ll take stock of your current situation–whether your personal, business, or academic life–and figure out where you want to go.  One of the major questions we will tackle is, “How can the coaching process help to elevate you from where you are to where you want to go?”  A good life or business coach works to help you envision a more balanced and successful future and then helps you acquire or hone the skills to achieve that vision.  This work is very practical and very strategic.
2. The role of a life or business coach is to help identify your strengths, skills, and abilities.This function of a coach is perhaps one of the most important.  Much time, energy, and resources are wasted when people labor to become better at things that they’re just plain bad at.  Don’t invest extra time in “improving” areas of natural disinterest. Instead of frustrating yourself and sapping your energy from more important things, a good coach will prompt you to identify and examine what you’re good at.
3. A coach works to maximize your strengths.Once you have figured out where your strengths lie, your coach should ask, “How can you use your strengths to position or prepare yourself to become the best?” My role as a coach is to push people to ask the hard questions that will help take them to the next level, guiding them to achieve greater balance, clarity, and success in life, school, or work.
4. An experienced coach engages in the coaching process as a dialog or collaboration. The coaching session should involve a lot of back-and-forth between you and your coach.  A coaching session is neither an advice-giving session (where the coach does all the talking) nor a therapy session (where the client does all the talking).

I always work to make sure my coaching sessions are balanced conversations–focused on exploring creative solutions and strategies, exposing blind spots, and asking questions.