Q: I was wondering what may be the best way to approach acknowledging to a previous employer, that you made a mistake leaving your previous job. A year ago, I left a well paying consulting position with a large technology company to pursue another job. Unfortunately, the new job has not met my expectations and I now regret my decision to leave my previous employer. ...
Real stories
How Gloria Successfully Recovered from Not Getting Promoted
Not getting the promotion we were expecting can be devastating to our self-image. I am here to tell you that you are not alone. In fact, not getting promoted can happen to the best of us. What is important is how you handle this unexpected news and what you do next to keep advancing in your career. ...
Soft Skills: Why Effective Upward Communication is Key to Advancement
We are giving public access to this recording on upward communication to showcase the type of content available in the Soft Skills Gym. For more recordings like this one, sign up today.
Welcome to the first candid conversation with one of our Executive Authors, Louis Johnston. Candid conversations are frank interviews I have with business executives regarding a personal story or some lesson they learned from their career. ...
Soft Skills – Note to Self: Shut Up and Take Action
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. ...
M.A.P. to Career Success
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. ...
How to Deal with Other’s Incompetence – 5 Tips
I work on multiple initiatives simultaneously at my current job. Some of them are long term, big projects, and some of them are smaller projects under one big program. Two of these smaller projects have given me serious headaches and stress in the past few days.
Why? Because the key people I work with on these two projects: ...
Trust Yourself and Take Your Own Path
I turned 40 this year. I don’t know about you, but in my 20s, I always thought that 40 year olds were very responsible people. I also thought that 40 year olds seemed to know what they were doing — they seemed to have life more figured out. They were usually married, with a house, career, and 2.2 kids. At that time, I may not have wished to be old, but I wished I and life more figured out. ...