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Soft Skills – Note to Self: Shut Up and Take Action

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It is New Year’s Eve day.  I am supposed to be happy and excited.  Instead I wake up very agitated.  My mind is teeming with negative thoughts.  I have been sick for two weeks.  I feel behind.  I feel unaccomplished. I feel tired even though I just got a full night’s sleep.

Then I catch myself.  I realize that, because I have not done much for my soft skills blog lately, the voice in my head is scolding me.  Negative thoughts fill my mind.  I feel deflated.  These feelings had been building up for a few days already. I knew I had to do something to break this pattern.  Instead of letting my negative thoughts control me, I decided to go for a run and de-stress a little. ...  read more

How to Find More Time and Live a “Why Not” Life

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Do you ever find yourself wishing that you had more time to do the things you love?  I work almost full time, have 2 kids, a household to manage, and I write this blog and newsletter in my “spare time.” Since I juggle all of this, I ask myself this question often, wishing I had 30 hours a day instead of 24 hours.  If you can identify at all with this question, I highly recommend watching this 11 min video by Kevin Smith, who answers this exact question with humor and passion. ...  read more

How to Stop Lack of Confidence

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A reader recently asked, via email, “How can one make up for a lack of self-confidence?  How do I beat this nasty character flaw?” Having self-confidence is integral to building Inner Excellence, so I thought this would be a good time to address this question.

First, let me start by telling you a story: ...  read more

M.A.P. to Career Success

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As I look back on my career, I have noticed a pattern to my success — every time I achieved something, three components were in play: Mindset, Action, and erseverance – more easily remembered as a M.A.P..

In this article, I’m going to explain what each part involves, along with some examples of each. I hope this framework and my stories below can support you in your career success journey. ...  read more

How to Manage Millennials on Your Team

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It’s my distinct pleasure to introduce our first Executive Author, Kate Lin (pen name).  Kate has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and over 20 years of work experience.  In the last 2 years, she has had extensive experience managing Millennials (aka recent college graduates) in her operations team.  Here are her insights and tips on: ...  read more

How to Make a Change in Yourself at Work

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We have been talking a lot about the different soft skills we need to accelerate our career success, including self-management skills, which are needed to build inner excellence (like patience, persistence, confidence), and people skills (like communication skills, managing people skills, etc.).  Well, one thing is common between all of these topics: in order to master any of these skills, we need to make changes in our behaviors at work. ...  read more

How to Stand Up for Yourself Without Sounding Defensive

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stand up for yourself

How to stand up for yourself is an important topic for us to discuss if you want to succeed like an executive.  As we discussed before, success is about working smarter not harder.  You have to subtly self promote to build your reputation.

As part of self promotion, it’s critical that you stand up for yourself when others are talking about your work in a way that can negatively affect your reputation.  For example, not everyone plays fair office politics: a person may falsely accuse you of some wrong, or take credit for your work.  It is also possible that a misunderstanding or miscommunication resulted in someone pointing fingers at you.  It’s unfair, but this is the reality of the corporate world. ...  read more