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“Creating Successful Leaders”

Category Archives: Changing Your Life

June 5, 2013 Save Money And Gain Knowledge With Online Courses

Paying for college is a drag, and although the job market is much better now than it was when I first began coaching a few years back, it’s still tough to know whether getting another degree is a smart investment.

The good news is Massive Open Online Courses, or “MOOC’s,” are providing people the world over with quality courses, free of charge. These classes are taught by real professors from some top notch schools, and MOOCs take advantage of video chat technology to create a sense of community.

Perhaps the company that’s making the biggest waves is Coursera. Having teamed up with universities like Stanford, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, Coursera provides five undergrad courses that the American Council on Education has approved to count toward college credit.

What excites me isn’t free college credit, even though this is a big step toward an affordable education. I’m excited about the opportunity this gives anyone who wants accessible, flexible and personal learning. Classes typically run from 6-12 weeks, and you are free to take as many or as few as you’d like. This gives even the busiest of us the chance to advance our education. And we can do it however we want.

If you’ve always been meaning to get caught up on the classic novels, for instance, take a literature course! If you’re crummy at math and don’t want to be anymore, there are math classes as basic as geometry 1. Or, you can develop the skills you apply everyday at work. Coursera offers economics courses, marketing courses and integrated technology courses, to name a few, all of which address real-world needs.

Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

 

The Next Web. “Online learning goes official as five Coursera courses get approved by the American Council on Education.”  Accessed June 4, 2013. http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/07/online-learning-goes-official-as-five-coursera-courses-get-approved-by-the-american-council-on-education/

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May 29, 2013 Being Consistent About Being Consistent

Whether it’s achieving a personal goal, boosting your business or developing relationships, perhaps the most important ingredient to success in any of these endeavors is consistency.

That’s all well and good, but what does this look like? How do we attain it? In other words, how does a person remain consistent about being consistent?

Widening the parameters

“One of the problems with temptations,” writes professor of psychology Timothy A. Pychyl, “is that they can seem relatively harmless. It seems so reasonable and seductive to conclude that not running ‘just today’ won’t harm our long-term health goals, and that eating that jelly donut won’t ruin our weight-loss goal.”

It’s true, one jelly donut won’t make you fat. But that isn’t the point, is it? A person becomes unhealthy by repeating unhealthy behavior over time. It’s not the one jelly donut, it’s the very many “just one” jelly donuts. By keeping the parameters strictly in the present, we actually make the problem worse.

A solution is to view your actions on a wider time-scale, as links in a chain which create an overall pattern of behavior. With a broader picture of your actions in mind, it becomes clear that “just this one” is really one of a great many. Change the action at the immediate level on a daily basis, and soon you’ll change the pattern entirely.

Consistency reinforces itself

It’s sobering knowing that one bad action leads to a pattern, but the good news is that this works in the reverse too. Since behaviors come in bundles, we can modify a single action every day knowing that this will soon develop into a bigger life pattern. In other words, don’t worry about taking on a huge self-improvement project. Focus on daily actions and feel good about those.

Speaking of which, I’m sure you’ve found that feeling good about your actions is addictive. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: you don’t need to feel guilty about feeling good about yourself! Use it to your advantage.

Consistency reveals character

We’re familiar with the phrase, “actions speak louder than words.” I’m guessing you’ve also experienced that terrible disconnect between your own actions and words. This is the result of a lack of consistency. In an ideal world, what you believe and what you do should line up perfectly. We don’t live in an ideal world, so you can forget about any idea of perfection. But what you can do is work toward consistency between your inner and outer selves. Act on your principles–little things, everyday. Clean up after the messes you’ll inevitably make, apologize for your inconsistencies, but keep forming new links in positive behavior chain.

One link, everyday!

Psychology Today. “More Effective Goal Intentions: Think Width and Consistency.” Accessed May 28, 2013. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/201011/more-effective-goal-intentions-think-width-and-consistency

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April 12, 2013 The Difference Between Skills And Passions When It Comes To A Great Job

In his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport makes a startling observation: “When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.”

How can this be? Don’t passions lead to great careers? That’s the common thinking, but Newport found that this is actually a dangerous way to search for a rewarding career. Your passions don’t always translate well from what you’re interested in to what you do for work, for one thing. For another, how can you know what a career will be like if before you’ve tried it? An aspiring musician may be passionate about music, but can they honestly say they’ll be happy with music for a career? Of course not; after all, I don’t think any of us have ever had a job that perfectly met our initial expectations of it.

Newport isn’t saying that being passionate is a bad thing. He’s instead warning us not to put too much confidence in our passions as the sure way to a rewarding career. It’s the other way around, in fact, as he explains:  “Passion is a side effect of mastery.”

It turns out that  current research (the Self-Determination Theory) has pointed to three main components that make you more motivated in your work:

Autonomy – the feeling that your actions throughout your day matter, and that you have control over your own work

Competence – knowing that you’re good at your work

Relatedness – connection to others in your place of work

These three ingredients, according to the Self-Determination Theory, enable you to achieve mastery in your work, and from there passion and happiness will naturally result. 

That’s right: rewarding careers are created through finding, refining and pursuing your skills, not your passions.

It may take a while longer to enact this principle, but I think Mr. Newport is onto something. We too often give “passion” too much credit when it comes to finding a great job and growing in it.

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Reference:

Newport, Cal. So Good They Can’t Ignore You. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2012.

 

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