If you feel you have 100% of the skills and capabilities for your next role, don’t take it.

Sound irrational?

People ask how much of a stretch is ideal when taking the next step in their career?

In my view, the ideal is to have 60% to 90% of the skills and capabilities for your next role. This leaves a 10% to 40% stretch.

“Stretch” gives you space and room for growth.

If you are a 100% fit for your next role, as soon as you step into it, there will be nothing for you to learn.

Consider It An Investment, In Yourself

Think of it this way.

We evaluate investments by the rate of return. A rate of return for bank interest rates is, say, 1 – 4%. That’s the baseline. A good rate of return would be 5 – 10%. A great rate of return would be 10 – 20%.

If you walk into a role and you’ve 100% of the skills, there’s little to no possibility for growth.

Growth is one of the very best investment returns you can receive from taking your next job.

At 0% professional growth, this is way less than what a bank returns for investing cash. And, we should consider professional growth more valuable than money.

This is why it’s an unwise career decision to take on a role you’re 100% ready for.

This is also why I say 60% to 90% is the sweet spot. At 90%, you’re assuming there is potential for at least 10% growth in a role. This is a modest, but still favourable, return for your professional growth. If you’re risk averse, it’s also a comfortable place to start for your next challenge.

If you step into a role where you’ve got 60% of the skills, there will be a steeper learning curve from the get-go.

It will be more demanding on you, especially in the first six months of the role (maybe a year). But, there will be higher return in your professional growth. Just think of how much you could learn?

Of course, we may be less likely to be hired for a role where we’ve 60% of the required skills. But it is not unheard of and we’ll never know if we don’t try.

5 Questions To Assess Stretch Level For Any Role

Given these things, how can you assess stretch?

I see stretch as a combination of 5 factors:

1. Leadership – do you have the necessary leadership skills to fulfil the role? Leadership might be a considered a combination of working with senior stakeholders, setting directions for a team, leading initiatives, managing budgets.
2. People Management – do you have the required people management skills to fulfil the role? If the role oversees five people, it will have less demanding requirements than if the role oversees fifty. Make no mistake, people management is very important, whether you manage one person or a hundred.
3. Skills / Capabilities – all roles require a specific set of specialist and/or generalist skills and capabilities. These are also the requirements that are most clearly defined in any role description. As a result, the best way to uncover these is to work through the position description or look at equivalent roles in similar industries. You can gauge this factor by dot-pointing all of the skill requirements for the role, and thinking about whether you possess them.
4. Experience – it’s important to think about experience. Do you have direct, hands-on experience, working with the issues and subjects that are relevant to this role? Often we don’t consider this element (thinking instead only about our specific skills), but experience counts, especially when we’re faced with challenges in the early days of starting a new job.
5. Life Circumstance – the final element to consider are life circumstances. The question here is, do you have the environment and circumstances that will help you ti excel in this role? And, if you don’t, can you see a way to put these support structures in place? For example, if the role requires travel twenty times a year and you have a young family, are you able to commit to this? This is just one example. Others will be based on your particular circumstances and what’s important to you.

While Life Circumstance is not strictly a requirement of a role, it does impact our likely success in any job. I like to include this question because even if we score highly in the other four, if we don’t have the right circumstances supporting us in a role, we’ll not perform at our best.

With these five factors in mind, think about the role you’re interested in, and mark yourself out of 10 for each of these factors.

When you’re done, add your scores and multiply by 2. Then minus from 100.

The figure you end up with is the stretch for the role.

Why Gut Is Sometimes More Important Than Science

You might be reading this and thinking, “that’s not all that scientific.”

Well, it’s not. It’s also not intended to be. It’s meant to be quick and based on your gut responses to the questions above.

Even though this a simple exercise, many people will not go to this effort when assessing a new role.

The majority of people will only think about whether they possess the skills for a role. Few people would think about all five question areas. Even fewer still would rank themselves out of 100 and then define how much of the job is a stretch.

So why is this worth doing?

Because going into a new role, these insights can be incredibly useful. They can:

• give you a clear sense of just how big the gap is for a new role.
• identity what level of professional growth the role may provide you, which is an important measure of return.
• help you identify and setup systems and processes when you start the new role to close the gap, as quickly as possible.

The goal of the exercise is not to think about why you are not qualified (ie. the gap) for a role.

The goal is to help you think about “stretch” as something that is attractive (because it represents growth) and to encourage you to apply because of this stretch, not despite it.

So if stretch is such a great thing, why don’t we actively look for it?

Not only do we not look for it as positive, but some research suggests that we look for stretch in different ways.

The Gender Imbalance

There is an often quoted study by HP which suggested that men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the qualifications, and women only apply when they meet 100% of them. The study suggested that this is due to different perceptions of confidence; men are more prepared to back themselves to address any gaps than women.

However, further research has looked at this more deeply, including a survey by Tara Mohr of a further thousand men and women.

Mohr’s results suggest confidence is not the most significant barrier to applying for roles. Mohr’s study found that in applying for a new role, a significant barrier is that women perceive that the “the job qualifications are real requirements, and see the hiring process as more by-the-book.”

In other words, it is not lack of confidence that creates the imbalance, but differences in how genders perceive whether the requirements and hiring processes are flexible and/or open to further influence.

The take away of this research is, regardless of gender, we should always consider throwing our hat in the ring, even if we perceive the gap in our qualifications to be significant.

While you will have a better chance at securing a role when you have 90% of the required capabilities, people with 60% of the skills do occasionally get the job!

I have known star performers in one industry who have switched careers and started new jobs. On paper, they held only 60% of the skills. Yet, they still got the role. Their hiring manager perceived that the skills they had from other industries were transferable. When they started in the new job, they were able to rapidly translate these skills to the role and succeed.

What is important when filling a larger gap in skills, is how we plan to fill these gaps. This is where having a great mentor, advisor or coach can give you an edge. Mentors, advisors and coaches are especially powerful when they’re working within the company where you are seeking a role.

Another consideration is whether the role is even right for you. I’ve known many people who’ve been attracted to new roles by big pay jumps, only to find these roles unfulfilling. You might consider other factors ahead of pay, such as whether the role gives you strong career prospects, access to leaders you respect, and fulfils your sense of purpose.

A Word For Hiring Managers and Leaders

It’s not only candidates that have responsibilities during a hiring process. As leaders and hiring managers, we can do a lot to make the hiring process fair.

Just as people going for a role have to think about the level of stretch the role requires of them, we have to face some realities in our hiring decisions.

We have to be open to those candidates who do not match the role 100%. Just because a candidate isn’t a 100% match for a role, doesn’t mean they do not have a great deal to offer.

Over the last ten years recruitment services provided by sites such as LinkedIn have provided incredible features to help match candidates to role requirements. Often though, this has reinforced specialization (not generalization) in career pathways.

The world needs both specialists and generalists. If we are only ever hiring specialists, we will miss the skill-set many generalists have, which is to build connection and meaning from subjects that appear seperate, but are actually related.

So if you have influence over hiring decisions, I encourage you to also consider those candidates who do not appear a 100% match for a role, but will bring other skills and experiences that may actually be more valuable.

As leaders and managers, we also have to acknowledge the unconscious bias that still exists in hiring decisions.

For every 100 men promoted and hired to a management position, only 72 are women. Unconscious bias, including performance bias, is still a reality that influences hiring decisions. Ensuring we have not only a mix of gender in our hiring process (and not only gender diversity, but all aspects of diversity), but that we’re considering the role of unconscious bias in how we hear and appoint candidates, is a step we can take.

Unconscious bias affects career prospects beyond hiring decisions. It also affects how people get access to leaders when they’re exploring career directions.

Women are 24% less likely to receive advice from senior leaders than men. And advice from senior leaders can be the crucial step in helping someone go for a role where there is more stretch and growth potential for their skills.

Mentors in particular help people gain access to skills, build confidence in their abilities and provide advocacy and support.

So if you are in a position where you give guidance to others, an important consideration is whether there is diversity and equity in those who have access to your advice.

The post About To Take Your Next Job? Think About This First appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I was six when I disassembled a remote control car and crossed the wires, convinced I could make it go faster. Not the most ingenious idea, I know. But I tried and failed and learnt something from the process. Fortunately I’m neither a mechanic nor an electrical engineer today.

Boredom inspired these explorations.

A curious mind sought entertainment. Because the immediate environment didn’t appear to offer it, I had to create my own.

I have no doubt this same curiosity has helped me build a career – from mapping out user journeys for complex websites through to writing strategies for new business ideas; much of this connects back with those earlier times.

Boredom was, and still is, a source of inspiration for me.

A Telling Interview With Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

In an interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, Buffet shares with us there are some days in his calendar where nothing is written down.  The interviewer, Charlie Rose, shows us by holding up the calendar to the camera.¹⁾

It seems contrary to everything we’ve learnt about time management. The fact is one of the richest and most successful men in the world is intentional about scheduling nothing, at least as it’s written on paper.

In the interview, it seems like Gates shares the same amazement we do. He even articulates it for us…

“Sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority….it’s not a proxy of your seriousness that you’ve filled (up) everything in your schedule.”

Bill Gates

The Gates and Buffet conversation summarizes what many of us may be feeling – that a packed schedule might be the key to time efficiency in the short term, but it might not lead to success in the long term.

It actually might not be any fun either. Go on, we can admit it. Being atomically busy can be a bit of a drag, really. What’s more, atomic busyness might also be robbing us of our flexibility, humour and ability to be strong leaders and deal with the unknown.²⁾

Having an open calendar is a far cry from being bored. But I ask you to consider, for a moment, that occupying our available time with meaningful pursuits is also the result of learning to cope with, pre-empt and overcome boredom. In this way it might be one of the keys to finding flow in our work and personal goals.

Is It Time To Declutter Our Schedule, As Marie Kondo Has Done Our Homes?

If there’s one thing Marie Kondo has done, it’s bring simplicity back into our home lives.

As we scramble through cupboards filled to the brim with odds and ends, where the broken strings of old tennis rackets almost take out an eye, Kondo teaches us to keep and treasure items which “spark joy”, or alternatively give a ceremonious “thanks” for items which do not, and discard them.

So simple! The one question of “does it spark joy” to restore balance and zen to our every day home lives.

While Kondo has helped us clear our physical spaces, we’ve some way to go with our mental ones.

We might ask ourselves, if our calendar was an object, packed with 15 minute intervals, would it spark joy when we picked it up?  Buffet knows the answer. It seems he’s also acted on this knowledge.

So, is it time to “Kondo” our calendar? If Kondo can re-frame clutter to cleanliness with a simple “thanks”, can we do the same with our schedule?

Boredom Is Not A Dirty Word

The first thing we’d need to do is acknowledge that “boredom” is not a dirty word. For the last decade, maybe two, we’ve run scared every time we hear it. Just the thought of the word can make us clutch for some form of entertainment.

Our chronic avoidance of boredom has even affected research. In an analysis of articles published on subjects affecting human emotion – happiness, sadness, anxiety or anger – there were roughly 128 articles for each emotion, but only 12 with boredom as their subject.³⁾

Are we anxious about studying boredom? Perhaps there’s a deeper aversion to boredom we just don’t want to face.

There’s no doubt boredom has a bad rap. It’s been linked to a whole suite of negative outcomes, from reduced interpersonal relationships, decreased task accuracy, and increased risk taking behaviour.

It is only recently social researchers have realised that boredom serves an important function.

When we no longer feel stimulated by an activity, we grow bored. We start to contemplate possible responses to the situation. In this way, the displeasure of boredom is both a trigger and motivator to seek alternative experiences and goals and, in so doing, change our circumstance.

Boredom moves us. And at its most effective, it moves us toward those pursuits that are more meaningful or congruent with our goals. 

This is one of the reasons Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, states:

“To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”

Cal Newport

If our impulse is to reach for the nearest distraction as soon as we feel bored, we might be short-circuiting an important exploratory behaviour that may be the solution to our long-term fulfilment. Like fear, if we spend too much time avoiding it, we may fail to see what’s on the other side of it. 

In a pilot study by two European researchers, participants who experienced a higher degree of boredom demonstrated a higher correlation with a subsequent search for more meaningful activities. The researchers found the interim results so interesting they crafted a larger study to see whether the degree of boredom might motivate socially positive actions.

The way they did this was straightforward; they asked 31 students to complete a recurring, repetitive task (eg. estimate the odds of selecting a blue or red ball in a random distribution of balls). At the end of this task they asked them how much they would donate to a charity associated with their university.⁴⁾

The research concluded that people who experienced higher degrees of boredom were more likely to donate to the cause. The higher the degree of boredom, the more likely those affected participants sought greater meaning elsewhere.

This and other research suggests that boredom plays an important role in how we pursue goals and fulfilment. At the least, it argues that we consider the positive role boredom can play, and not just the negative one, as has been the focus of much research to date. 

There is increasing evidence that suggests that boredom may not only be a mental state, but an emotion as well. In a study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, boredom was found to elicit a similar response to feelings of elation.⁵⁾

Boredom, Creativity & Innovation

Having attended at least ten hacking events over the last decade (for companies I worked for, as a participant, an observer and occasionally a judge), I am convinced that boredom plays a role in the success of these events.

With many hack days running over 48 to 72 hours, what ignites people’s enthusiasm is the chance to do something different from their usual activities and tackle new products and services that either respond to the lacklustre performance of existing ones or promise entirely new ways to do things. In other words, these teams find what’s boring within what exists, and replace it with something more compelling.

When we think about it, hack events are successful because they are an important interruption to what is often a routine annual calendar. They are the equivalent of Buffet’s open schedule. They deliver an opportunity to break away from routine and participate in a new discovery.     

Hack days often start off the same way; with a sense of nervous excitement and open possibility. Participants have described this to me as an uncomfortable feeling that they know will subside as the days progress. 

Hack days are effective because they apply structure to give space to unstructured activities. They are the equivalent of being intentional about scheduling “open time”. 

What Can We Do

There is a simple way you can explore the connection between boredom and creativity in your life.

The next time you feel bored, instead of reaching for something to fill the space (whether our social media feed or some other form of entertainment)… why not endure a little longer?

Ask yourself the question – what other activity could fill this time which may be more meaningful?

Even if you have only a short time available to you (20 minutes), consider using this time toward a personal goal.

What we’re doing here is ‘trading activities’. We’re raising our awareness of knee jerk patterns, and replacing them with purposeful ones, and being aware that boredom is the catalyst to doing so.

I’m also not suggesting to do this all the time. We all need a break and I love my Netflix time, just like anyone. But lately I do consciously switch these activities with thinking time.

At first this might feel strange, even a little uncomfortable. But when we swap activities for ones which take us closer toward our goals, it’s a likely sign we’re on the right track.

The post Why Boredom Can Be Good For You & Your Creativity appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Here are 21 of my favorites for morning, afternoon and anytime.

Morning Habits

1. Drink Two Glasses Of Water Upon Waking
When we wake, our body has not had water for 6 to 8 hours and is already in a state of dehydration. Drinking two glasses of water restores your hydration and gives you energy for the day.

2. Make Your Bed Every Day
When you make your bed in the morning, you start the day with a task completed. And if you have a rubbish day, you’ll return to a bed that is made. Take it from a SEAL commander.

3. Stretch To Keep Your Back Healthy
We spend so much time hunched over laptops and craning our neck to view our mobile phones. The long term consequences of this can affect our overall spine health. Daily stretches increase blood circulation, increase fine motor skills and increase mobility. And a simple morning stretch routine boosts energy for the rest of the day.

4. Either: i) Avoid Social Media Until A Certain Time; or ii) Limit It To Several Times 
A founder of one of the dominant social media platforms said:

“[Social media] literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Numerous studies have looked at the negative effects of overusing social media.

I love social media but lately I’ve been more focused on using it in moderation and putting other activities first.

5. Avoid Processed Or Packaged Foods
The vast majority of nicely packaged snacks contain lots of processed food or are high in sugar. They give our brains an injection of glucose which, once burned, dumps us into fatigue. Eat whole foods for sustained energy and mental clarity.

6. Sugary Drinks In Moderation
It takes a fraction of a second to decide on a non-sugary drink instead of a sugary one. With anywhere from 30 to 50 grams of sugar for some sugary drinks, too many can be tough on our brains.

7. Strengthen Your Core
Strengthening your abdominal area builds core strength, which keeps your body agile and dynamic. In as little as two minutes a day, there are a range of exercises to build core strength, that don’t have to be sit-ups (eg. a plank exercise). What’s more you can do these in the house  without needing to go to a gym. Beyond this, every day activities like walking, gardening, and carrying moderate loads all help to build core strength.

8. Say ‘Yes’ Spontaneously
Saying ‘yes’ to something you might not normally do, takes you out of your comfort zone. And this is important for ongoing growth and expansion. I’m not suggesting you ‘yes’ to something dangerous, but a little ‘crazy’ is good for all of us now and then.

Afternoon Habits

9. Avoid Coffee After 4pm
According to ‘Why We Sleep’ by Matthew Walker, caffeine has a half-life of five to seven hours in the body. That means it takes this amount of time for your body to remove at least half the effects of caffeine. So if you drink coffee at 4pm, by 11pm there’s a good chance 50% of the caffeine will still be in your system, which could disturb sleep. Limiting coffee to the mornings or early afternoon means less chance of it causing trouble with our night-time recovery.

10. Write A Short Journal Entry
In as little as two minutes you can write what you’ve done in the day. This makes us more reflective and gives us a thread to track our memories through life. Lately I’ve been using the Day One app to track my entries.

11. Read Three Pages Of A Book
Struggle to read a book? Many people can read more by changing their benchmark. Instead of focusing on getting through the book, change the goal to reading three pages every day. In those three pages, we often get absorbed in the book and read more, without it seeming like a chore.  Success stories of today – Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and many more – attribute a large part of their success to reading.¹⁾

12. Reflect On Your Goals Or Resolutions
Many people write resolutions every year and don’t look at them until the following year. Set yourself the practice of re-visiting your goals every day and you’ll be amazed how this keeps them in focus.

13. Write Or Say One Goal x10 
I guarantee you if you take one goal and either write it or say it out loud x10, your conscious mind will focus attention on how to make it happen. Connecting a physical action (writing or saying something), helps your brain with these processes of external storage and encoding.

External storage provides a cue that brings your goal into focus. Encoding helps your brain determine what is retained and what is discarded in memory.

By focusing on a goal on a regular basis, you are literally teaching your brain to maintain your goal in conscious attention, so that you filter the external environment for signals that are relevant to that goal.

The research supports this. People who write, say or describe goals vividly are up to 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to realise their goals. ²⁾

14. Focus On One Thing You’ve Done Or Are Grateful For 
You’ve done great things today. Within each and every day, think of one thing where you surprised yourself. This gives us joy. It makes us feel fulfilled. It costs nothing and is quick to do.

15. Do One Thing You’ve Been Avoiding
If you’re like me, you might have a list of things you know you need to do, but have been avoiding. Sometimes I feel like this list owns me, not me owning it. So I started doing one thing on this list every day. Very quickly this list became smaller and I feel all the better for it.

16. Book A Catch Up With Someone You Enjoy Spending Time With
Some of the most meaningful insights you’ll have in life, come from talking with people you enjoy spending time with. Take two minutes to book a coffee with one of these people. You’ll never regret it.

Anytime Habits

17. Tell Your Partner/Family You Appreciate Them
A few years ago The New York Times said married couples only talk to each other, on average, less than 4 minutes a day. In another psychology study, researchers found that unless husbands and wives told each other five positive things for every one negative thing, the marriage would likely fail. If you’re in a relationship, tell the person you appreciate or love them every day. And if not in a relationship, tell someone in your family or a close friend how much they mean to you.

18. Acknowledge One Person Each Day Who Made A Difference To You
Just recently a person in my professional network had lunch with me and shared some incredible stories. I told them how much of a difference it had made to me; that they had taken time and shared their wealth of experience. When you acknowledge the kindness that someone else has done for you, you strengthen your relationship with them. This is important because a 75 year study by Harvard researchers found that the ongoing strength of relationships is vital to ongoing happiness.

19. Stop & Focus On Your Breathing 
Once a day…stop. Spend two minutes focusing on your breathing. Even in the midst of chaos, it will give you calm. It will clear your mind. And it will put your body and thoughts back in sync for what you need to do next.

20. Belief & Discipline
Belief and discipline are incredibly underrated. Above talent and IQ, if you believe in yourself and pursue your priorities with continued practice, you’ll achieve remarkable results.

In 2005 Martin Seligman and Angela Ducksworth from the University of Pennsylvania conducted two seperate studies on eighth grade students. They wanted to put to the test whether those students with higher propensity to focus would outperform those students who had higher IQs.

The research found that “highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable, including report-card grades, standardized achievement-test scores, admission to a competitive high school.” ³⁾

You might say anyone can work hard to get slightly ahead. This may be true, but in this study those with discipline weren’t a bit ahead. For many of the indications, the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was often twice the size of the correlation when compared with the cohort of high IQ students.

So if you have two minutes, push one doubt that you have aside or do one action that helps with you one of your goals.

21. Update Your Habit List
I’ve spent months researching and understanding habits. The simple lesson I learned is to practice simple habits, connected to goals, and do them every day. To do this, a habit list can help you track whether what you wanted to do, is what you actually did. I update my habit list daily. Sometimes I miss things. But looking at this list and updating it is enough to keep me focused on what actions I want to create.

If you enjoyed this article, I’d love to hear which is your favorite among this list or any other micro-habits that are important to your success. Consider leaving a comment below.

The post 21 Micro Habits To Boost Your Day appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

In this article you’ll learn about three stages for maturing a blog, where each stage has different goals for writers.

When I first started my blog, I had a few ideas but didn’t know whether they would be useful to others. I had some writing experience but hadn’t taken the time to translate this experience to writing about niche subjects.

The thought of starting a blog scared me.

I would look at sites with dozens of articles and wonder how I would write that much.

This is a path every writer crosses at one time or another. During those early stages, I realized my first goal had to be to write, not worry about whether my blog would be successful.

If you’ve been thinking about writing and have similar concerns, you’re not alone.

Fortunately the process of writing regularly and publishing articles will shake away the majority of these troubles. When you hit a rhythm with your writing, you’ll find inspiration and writing will become far simpler.

I grew to thoroughly enjoy the experience and, overtime, traffic to my blog grew. At first this happened slowly and then at a more regular trend.

Working through this I saw three stages my writing and my blog went through. Just being aware of these stages helps writers focus their energy on specific goals.

The stages are create, curate and convert.

Create Through Your Blog

During the creation phase the main goal is to generate content.

If you’re starting a blog or in the first year of publishing content, you’ll want to expand a variety of content for your writing niche.

In most circumstances, within any niche, you will chose around seven major categories to write about.

This number is particularly useful as it’s around the number our brains are able to store in working memory, so starting out with this many categories will help your audience understand and recall your subjects of interest. ¹⁾

In the creation stage, publishing quality content on a regular basis is the most important thing you can do.

Whether you publish daily or weekly, it’s important to establish and maintain your rhythm, because every article published is building your main asset – your blog.

Often we feel anxiety at this stage. Are we doing things right? Are we creating value for our readers? Is anyone looking at our site?

I encourage you to to push these concerns aside.

In my own case, my first year of publishing received a fraction of the visits I receive today. But the process of investing in my blog set me up for a rapid increase in visitors further down the track. By going through this process, I learned what I wanted to write about.

If you publish weekly, within 4 to 12 weeks you will start to notice your site being picked up by search engines. But beyond traffic, just publishing quality content is the most important measure you can have.

Curate Through Your Blog

Curation begins when you realize you’ve created a solid number of articles within your categories of interest.

With all this content, now comes the time to help your audience build connections between these posts so they have a logical way to step through your ideas and connect the dots.

The goal during this stage is to build connections between your posts to extract even more value out of your content.

There are a number of ways to do this, including:

• building summary pages of the most popular articles
• creating posts that build a step-by-step guide of which posts can be read in which order
• elevating your most popular content in list posts
• going through previous posts and building links or meaningful tags to create context between your articles

Each of these tactics builds internal links within your site.

Applying strong curation at this stage will help attract more visitors, have them view more pages of your blog, and stay longer.

According to SEO expert, Neil Patel, internal linking does three things: aids in website navigation, defines the architecture and hierarchy of a website, and distributes ‘page authority’ (an important SEO metric) and ranking power throughout the site. ²⁾

Because curation helps search engines build greater contextual links between your content, it will also give your site a nice performance boost in traffic.

Convert Through Your Blog

Having worked through the two previous stages you’ll likely be attracting thousands (maybe even tens of thousands of visitors every month).

This is the time to consider if you want to monetize your traffic and, if so, how.

There are many different strategies to do this. A few common ones include:

• email list building
• running Google Ad Sense advertising on your site
• generating affiliate revenue by positioning third party products
• selling your own products (physical or digital) to your audience
• generating leads through your website for offline businesses

Macro and Micro Conversion Points

When thinking about conversion, it’s important to think about your macro and micro conversion points.

Macro events are those that we traditionally think of within e-commerce, such as a product purchase and shopping carts.

Micro events are all of those actions that occur before these macro events, which contribute to the macro events. These events represent a user’s potential desire in your product and, overtime, may accumulate toward a macro event.

Examples of micro conversion events can include:

• growing repeat traffic
• traffic from social campaigns / postings
• subscribing to a newsletter
• spending a certain amount of time on an important page
• following a specific pathway from one page to the next
• adding a comment on an article
• adding a product to a wish list

The great thing about micro conversion events is you can establish these even if you’re not selling anything on your site, as a way to measure engagement of your audience.

A Word About Monetization

Many people think that the ultimate goal of a blog is to directly monetize it. But that’s not necessarily the case.

I’ve seen a lot of people rush to monetize their site, only to crowd their pages with advertisements, which put off their readers.

There are many ways successful blogs also generate indirect gains.

For example, blogs can build credibility and expertise in a specific niche, allowing the writer to reach hundreds of thousands of people they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. While this isn’t direct revenue, the indirect benefits can be significant.

And there are other goals connected with blogging – learning, self-expression, creativity, etc – that might not have a direct commercial aim.

You’ll find lots of articles online about how to monetize your blog.

My advice would be to carefully consider these relative to the purpose of your site and your audience, because it’s easy to lose an audience and far more difficult to build one.

Apply The 3 Stages

In all of the three stages above – creating, curating and converting – it’s possible to jump between all three at the same time.

For example, there’s no reason you couldn’t think about monetizing your blog (stage 3), while you are creating content (stage 1). You’ll just have fewer raw materials available to you until you progress more fully through each stage.

And I’ve found thinking about each stage helpful in focusing my goals each year.

I hope this advice is useful to you. If you are thinking about starting a blog or doing writing in general, you have my full encouragement.

It is one of the very best ways to learn about what interests you. You’ll be amazed by how readers reach out to you. You may even discover a new career in the process.

The post 3 Stages To Grow & Monetize Your Blog appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

What a great question!

I thought about this question and did some research. From this I found the eight hobbies below that, if followed on a consistent basis, will improve cognitive capacity.

My belief is that any hobby that allows you to experience from the Learning Loop will make you better, stronger and smarter.

So long as you absorb and apply feedback through this loop, you’ll get better at whatever you do.

By applying this learning loop, these hobbies are proven to help people lead a smarter and more balanced life.

Reading – Expand Your Mind

Warren Buffet told students at a Columbia Business School: “Read 500 pages…every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” Enough said :).

Writing – Structure How Your Brain Thinks

Jeff Bezos doesn’t allow his employees to express new ideas as slides….he only accepts written documents and narratives. There’s good reason for this. Writing is one of the best ways to train yourself how to structure an argument, build a story and convey ideas logically.

Education – Build Intellectual Wealth

Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, said “I am concerned that too many people are focused too much on money and not on their greatest wealth, which is their education.” Education is one of the best ways to expand your mind and increase intelligence.

Music – Expanded Cognitive Skills

While studies differ on whether there is such a thing as the Mozart Effect (a hypothesis put forward by Dr Gordon Shaw, that listening to Mozart while studying boosts IQ), listening to music is one of the very best ways to get into ‘flow’. Whether you’re studying or working on a complex problem, music can help your brain do its best work. And playing a musical instrument has been proven to increase cognitive skills and brain function. So if music is food for your ears, eat well and nutritiously :).

Martial Arts/Dance/Yoga/Focused Exercise – Know Your Body, Know Yourself

Intellectual intelligence is different from body intelligence. Truly knowing ourselves requires us to connect our mind and our body. Any hobby that does this – martial arts, dance, yoga, sports – will help you build this connection and learn about yourself.

Open Mindedness – Take An Expansive Frame

A good deal of the world is closed minded…but thankfully, many people are open minded. Practice compassion, tolerance, love. Look for the good in people and yourself. Be curious and treat the world as a place with boundless opportunity for learning. How we frame things is how we see things, so select an expansive frame rather that a limiting one. Your world will expand and so will you.

Travel – Build Empathy For The World

Travel builds empathy for other cultures. And empathy is one of the greatest ways to build emotional intelligence. See as much of the world as you can, but don’t forget the value of ‘home’. Every country is full of wonder, and that is true especially of the places each and every one of us come from.

Lifelong Learning – Start Curious, Stay Curious

Learning doesn’t have to stop. When I meet eighty and ninety year olds, I can tell the ones that have chosen lifelong learning.

They are still curious and alive with possibility.

Few other pursuits other than lifelong learning ignite our curiosity, keep our minds active and our bodies engaged.

Start curious and stay curious. Share what you learn with someone. Aim to never stop learning.

What do you believe are the most important hobbies that have made you smarter? Please consider sharing your thoughts by adding a comment.

The post 8 Hobbies That Make You Smarter appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

Picture this. You have to give a big presentation. It’s one of the larger ones you’ve done, with an audience with several hundred people.

If you’re like many people, just the thought of this is enough to spike a little anxiety. Most of us share a fear of public speaking.

On the day of your presentation, you feel great. You’ve rehearsed the presentation dozens of times. You have your key points spot on. You’re not only going to nail the presentation, but you’re going to have fun doing it!

As you take the stage to deliver your opening you notice your slides aren’t working. The screen is black.

You see the panicked technician at the back of the room. You figure your slides aren’t going to work. And you don’t know whether that will be for 10 seconds or 10 minutes.

Your audience is waiting. You remain calm. You take a moment to assess the situation.

This would ruffle most people, but not you.

Why? Because you prepared for this.

You know you can speak for at least 10 minutes before you need a single slide. That should give the technician enough time to figure things out. And if not, well, in ten minutes you’ll deal with that too.

So you start your presentation with confidence. Despite the bright lights you see enough people in the front rows of the audience to see they’re impressed that you’re not ruffled.

Why The All-Greats Mentally Prepare

It might seem like over-preparation, to plan for the possibility the slides might fail.

But I can tell you some of the greatest leaders, athletes and business people in history take mental preparation very seriously.

Before we look at examples, let’s look at why preparing for even unlikely situations is important.

When we practice a potential response to a situation, something important happens. At first, we have to apply all of our attention to creating a response. This fires up two important areas of our brain, our neocortex and prefrontal cortex, which are responsible for the type of thinking involved in exploring complex tasks.

As we practice a response, the response starts to become routinized, requiring less and less of our conscious attention. This process of routinization is important. When known routines are in place, after an initial assessment of the situation, our attention is able to “outsource” parts of the response to other faculties in our brain and body, which take care of the action.

This process only occurs through practice and experience. It’s an important contributor to patterns for high performance and is more difficult to generate in the heat of the moment, when no prior practice has been performed.

Remember the first time you drove a car? It took a lot of work and concentration. It required every bit of your attention to think of what you needed to do. Over time it became much easier. Now when you drive, you focus your attention on the road, because the act of turning the wheel, flicking the indicator, pushing the breaks, are all routinized processes done with little thought through sensory motor routines.

The same can be applied to other situations.

If faced with a particularly tough and new problem that we’re expected to solve on the spot, like the slides not working in a presentation, we perform far better if we have a suitable response accessible in our memory, than if we have to make one up on the fly.

A Cycle To Mentally Prepare

Researchers believe this is because a kind of dynamic dance occurs when we’re placed in high pressure situations.

The more experience we have with a situation, the easier we are able to deal with it. This occurs as we read cues in our environment, and then use inferred reasoning to match those cues with our previous experience of a situation. This gives us a greater depth of strategic thinking to execute a suitable response.

This is one of the reasons why paramedics who have more experience, are to provide faster, more effective emergency care than less experienced colleagues. ¹⁾

What is so interesting is that we can train for these situations, before they occur. This is particularly useful for important events. Consider these examples…

3 Examples Of How To Mentally Prepare

Broken Goggles

Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian history has known, with a total of 28 gold medals to his name. But in the 2008 Olympic Games, in the last 100m of the butterfly event, he faced a tough moment. His goggles filled with water, greatly reducing his visibility. This would have created panic in most competitors…but not Phelps. That’s because Phelps had prepared for this very possibility. Knowing that something as simple as goggles breaking in an Olympic event could mean the difference between winning and losing, he learnt to train without needing his goggles. So when his goggles broke in the Olympic event, he didn’t panic and went on to win the race.

SEAL Team Training

David Cooper led Seal Team 6. He had taken his team into many precarious situations. For one mission, his commanding officer asked him to use a new helicopter still at a prototype stage of testing. Having had prior experiences with experimental technologies going wrong, Cooper had his team prepare for the possibility the helicopter would be forced to make a crash landing. To mentally prepare his team, they ran drill after drill to emulate a real life situation.  He did this despite assurances the helicopter would be fit-for-purpose. When the real situation came, and the helicopter was indeed forced into an emergency landing, Cooper’s team had trained for this very event. Instead of being thrown into chaos, they had prior experience of how to deal with it and completed their mission. ²⁾

Flight Simulation

The final example is flight simulation.  We naturally assume when pilots undergo simulation training they are learning to become better pilots. One of the reasons for this, is that through practice they are building a type of personal databank of situations they may encounter. This helps if they hit a real situation and need to recall this knowledge in a time of crisis. What we don’t naturally assume is that simulation training may be as important as time in a real plane. In a study that reviewed 26 experiments for flight training in the military, researchers discovered that flight simulator training, when combined with time in real jets, was often more effective for pilots than jet-time alone. ³⁾

In sport, this model has been used for decades to build different types of resilience in althetes and leaders. The football team rehearses hundreds of plays, so when they need to call on a specific offense, the perfect play is already available in their muscle memory. Tennis players study their toughest opponents and develop specific counter-measures to combat their strengths, which are often rehearsed thousands of times between tournaments.

Mentally Prepare For Anything With These 4 Steps

You and I can apply these same principles to increase our success in high pressure moments.

By understanding the process that others have used, all we need to do is take four actions.

1.  Imagine Different Scenarios
In the very first example with the presentation, the scenario was ‘something to prevent our presentation from going as planned’. The scenario Michael Phelps used to mentally prepare was  ‘something that might distract him during a competitive performance’.

In this step, we need to know the important moment or event that we’re training for, and imagine what might challenge it. This doesn’t have to be a negative scenario, it could also be a positive one. For example, say you’re bringing a new product to market, and it sells out in half the time you expect. That would be a positive scenario.

2. Define The Cue
It’s helpful to identify a specific cue to respond to. In the presentation, the cue was the slides not working. In the Phelps example, it was his goggles not working. By being specific about the cue, it helps us visualize a very real situation, and also gives us a target to respond to.

3. Consider Similar Experiences
While we may not have dealt with the same situation before, the chances are we’ve dealt with something similar.

No chess game is alike. But when experienced chess players meet, they search through all of their experiences with other games to find a pattern that might resemble the game they’re playing.

So in this step, we query our memories to think about similar situations we’ve dealt with, that might give us access to possible responses.

4. Practice The Response
In the final step we practice our response. You can use a number of techniques to doing this.

You can visualize yourself in the situation, picturing how you would respond. You could act out the response, as though you were really in the situation, like Phelps did when he trained without goggles. You may also find the sketchnoting and visual thinking can help you elaborate the scenario you have in mind.

For every time you practice a response, think about what you would improve and then put those improvements into action.

This model is immensely useful for us as individuals and can be applied easily to other circumstances.

A team could use this model to mentally prepare for situations where an initiative failed or did exceedingly well.

A company could use this model to prepare its resources for a dip in revenue, a new competitor entering the market or customer demand spiking to high levels.

If you found this article helpful, please considering sharing a comment below.

The post Mentally Prepare To Be Your Best: What Science Tells Us appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

We look for a pattern in our improvement.

There are three patterns for high performance we might expect, but there is also a fourth pattern that, from my experience, we rarely think about. And it’s this last pattern that makes us feel frustrated, sometimes enough to give up our goal.

When we track our progress with a new development activity, ideally we look for small gains in our performance, every time we practice the activity.

The runner wants to see their time steadily decrease for a selected distance. The weightlifter aims to increase weight for each new session. The leader might want to see their team’s output increase over time.

It’s human nature to expect the measure to get better, whatever it may be –speed, time, weight, distance,  volume, quality. We feel a sense of achievement when we see these measures improving over time.

The four patterns I’m about to share with you are linear improvement, diminishing returns, accelerating gains and the zig-zag pattern.

These patterns won’t apply for a one-off task. But for habits or routines that we’re looking to embed into our regular practice to boost performance, knowing these patterns can mean the difference between success and failure.

Linear pattern for high performance

In linear progress, performance increases at a constant rate.

Let’s say you took on the task of writing, with the aim of writing 1,000 words a day, and increasing that amount by 10 words per day. On day one you would write 1,000 words. By the end of the first year of writing, you would write 4,640 words per day.

This is completely possible within a first year of writing. The performance trend would look something like this, progressing in a linear, even line.

Advice: in linear patterns, steady increases yield strong gains overtime. The key is to be patient, and allow the passage of time and small increases to reveal significant change.

Diminishing Returns pattern for high performance

In the second pattern, after an initial burst of gains, it becomes more difficult to realise increases in performance when compared with prior periods.

This is a pattern of diminishing returns – while we’re using the same amount of energy, we’re seeing smaller increases in the performance measure we’re tracking.

This occurs when we start to move closer toward a natural limit or threshold.

As an example, professional weight lifters who commence training see high gains in the initial phase of their training. As their strength increases, they lift higher and higher weights.

As they approach the limits of what their body can lift, they still realise gains through hard training, but these gains are likely to be smaller and smaller, requiring more and more effort to realise. The same is true in many sports.

Usain Bolt set the Olympic World Record for the 100m of 9.63 seconds in Jamaica in 2012. Before that, in 2008, he set a new record of 9.69 seconds, which beat Donovan Bailey’s previous time of 9.84 seconds in 1996.¹⁾

To realise these small gains required enormous effort, and that is the nature of competition in such sports, where fractions of a second mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Often when elite athletes reach these limits, they seek new knowledge, in order to break-through their limits. This is why many athletes seek new coaches at important times in their careers.

Advice: when we’re doing activities that result in diminishing returns, we need to do two things. The first is to realise smaller gains are not necessarily an outcome of our efforts. We need not be disappointed, because we’re reaching a threshold that is often not of our own making. The second is to seek new knowledge (whether that be in the form of a coach, our network, or self-learning) to move through this threshold.

Accelerating Gains pattern for high performance

Accelerating gains occur when the measure we’re tracking increases with every new day of practice. This is a pattern of rapid expansion and growth.

We often think of this type of gain in terms of the share market. A new stock may go through a burst in valuation, creating a steep rise in growth.

We don’t always think about it in terms of our personal development. But in life we can go through these periods.

When Steve Jobs rejoined as Apple CEO in 1997, the company had $1 billion of loses from the previous year. The next phase of growth he started for the company was one of accelerated growth.  This must have been an exhilarating time, but also one where everything moved with incredible speed, and where Jobs himself likely faced accelerated growth. ²⁾

We can see the same accelerating gains pattern in our own lives. If we read for thirty minutes every day for six months, likely we would go through a pattern of accelerated gains. Because it’s not just the new knowledge we’d acquire from each book, but the connections between this material, that would make the sum greater than the parts.

Warren Buffet told students at a Columbia Business School:

“Read 500 pages…every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” ³⁾

Advice: the struggle during accelerated growth may be to keep up with the pace of change, and also keep oneself steady and balanced. Questions like, “am I keeping up with this speed, how am I keeping myself steady with all that’s happening around me, am I focused on a ‘true north / mission / vision’ to guide myself through this pace” can be very helpful.

Zig Zag  pattern for high performance

While the three earlier patterns are well known to you and I, from my experience we think less about this final pattern.

The Zig Zag pattern for personal development involves a pathway of twists and turns and ups and downs that are far less predictable and stable to the earlier patterns.

This pattern can be observed in business as well as sports.

A collaboration of four researchers from Australia and Canada found the zig zag pattern when studying 256 athletes across 27 different sports, as they pursued pathways through amateur and professional sports.

The research uncovered that “more than half of the athletes (57.4%) descended from a higher junior competition to a lower senior competition level in order to eventually progress to Senior Elite competition.” ⁴⁾

34% all athletes in the study had at least one dip in their trajectory, with majority of this number experiencing two or more downturns in their trajectory.

This staggered pathway applied to both Olympians and non-Olympians. There were no significant differences between these groups, suggesting that the zig zag pattern of improvement is indiscriminate.

The study found that “trajectories of development are mostly characterised by non-linear patterns, with highly variable oscillations between and within the junior and senior competition levels.”

If we extend this thinking to our own personal development, we could expect to see a dip in performance, right before we see an uplift in improved performance.

The zig zag pattern is a classic rollercoaster of ups and downs, of breakdowns and breakthroughs.

As you’re reading this, you may remember a time when you have gone through a pattern that looked a lot like this. Perhaps you remember a particular moment, where you evaluated whether continue with the activity or do something else entirely.

In my own training, in a sport I’ve done for over ten years, I recall times where I saw little progress.

It would feel as though I was in a slump, like I’d hit a wall for my development in that area. It would be tough work emotionally and physically.

And then one week, everything would fall into place, and I would go through an accelerated path of growth.

At these times it was not unusual for other people I trained with to say, ‘something has changed in your training’, ‘things are just clicking for you at the moment’.

When we’re in the downward path of the zig-zag pattern, it can feel like our efforts are getting us nowhere and things are hard work.

This is where we need to rely on habits most of all. Because it’s by practicing regular activities that eventually the downward pattern will subside, and we’ll find ourselves again on an upward trend.

In fact, if there is one comfort in the zig-zag pattern, it’s that it feels very different to the other patterns.

Rather than a slowdown in the gains you are making, the zig zag patterns feels likes our performance is actually dropping off.

Those are the signals we’re in the zig-zag pattern. It’s also the signal that our mind is re-ordering what it knows, and is getting ready for the next big push.

Unfortunately often people become disillusioned during this stage. From entrepreneurs to athletes, when the zig-zag pattern feels tough, it’s tempting to stop the activity that causes us to feel like this.  But this is where persistence is actually most needed.

History is full of examples where people have experienced a zig-zag pattern and have continued anyway. They have been able to push through a temporary dip in performance, to then reach the next upward trend in gains.

In 1974, Spencer Silver invented a strange adhesive. He spent five years trying to interest colleagues in it. He could have easily given up. But he persisted. In 1977 he met Arthur Fry who gave him the idea to market the product as an adhesive for paper, and so Post It notes became a marketable product.

In 1936 a little-known writer created a book while working as a cartoonist for Judge Magazine. He shopped his book around and wracked up 27 rejection letters, before he bumped into a friend who encouraged him to submit one last time to Vanguard Press, who then went on to published his first book. That writer was Dr Seuss, who eventually published A Cat in The Hat in 1957 with great success.

Brian Acton was the software engineer that Facebook and Twitter rejected in 2009. Just five years later, Facebook bought the company he co-founded, What’s App, for $16 billion.⁵⁾

Imagine if these and many others had given up? What would the world be like without all of the outcomes which we have come to know and love, many of which resulted when people pushed through the zig zag pattern.

Advice: One thing that is incredibly important when we’re faced with a zig-zag pattern is to keep our enduring purpose front of mind. For us as individuals, this might be in the form of a goal or objective. For companies, mission and vision statements act as a reminder for what teams strive for in the face of adversity. It might be worth considering what makes a great mission statement and vision statement.

If you enjoyed this article, I would love to hear. Please consider leaving a comment below.

The post 4 Patterns For High Performance (And One Many People Miss Completely) appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

The quotes I’m about to share with you are ones that keep returning to me.

When I’m facing a big decision, tough situation or pursuing an opportunity, these are the ones I remember.

#1. “Love people use things, the opposite never works.” Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus
This statement is from the Minimalist documentary on Netflix and was said by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus. It reminds me to respect everyone and look for the value in all people, as well as not become too obsessed with material possessions.

#2. “I want to be in the arena. I want to be brave with my life. And when we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.” Brené Brown
Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability is re-writing much of what is considered leadership today.  Her research even led her to refine many of her assumptions about strength, as shown in her talk ‘On Vulnerability‘, which is one of the most viewed Ted talks of all time. The concept of ‘daring greatly’, extending ourselves beyond our comfort zones and, more recently, prevention and promotion in psychology, are requisites for high performance.

#3. “If you wanna change the world, make your bed every day.” Admiral William McRaven
Admiral William McRaven gave an incredible speech at University of Texas in 2014. In it he also said “If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day…..making your bed will reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter….and if by chance you had a miserable day, you will come back to a bed that is made.” Recently I’ve been doing a good deal of research into ‘habits’. Habits are the engine room of our activity. They are involved in absolutely everything we do, from walking down the street to driving a car. They can also be used to rapidly increase our performance. This quote from McRaven reminds us how important it is to establish ‘cornerstone habits’ into our daily practice, so we start the day with a task completed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OoCaGsz94

#4. “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Steve Jobs
I’ve been fortunate to work in large teams. The best leaders I’ve worked with knew not to over-direct people or  micro-manage their activities, just as this quote suggests. If we follow this quote we will be better leaders and learn to access the skills and expertise of the people around us. Beyond this quote, Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford in 2005 is generally an inspiration, with much advice for work and life.

#5. “Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job. If you work hard on your job you’ll make a living, if you work hard on yourself you can make a fortune.” Jim Rohn
This quote reminds us to develop ourselves in ways that extend well beyond our careers. If we follow this advice, we will become happier, smarter, and more resourceful. In this sense, ‘fortune’ refers not just to financial wealth, but holistic wealth in every aspect of our lives.

#6. “Your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share.” Ginni Rometty
Ginni Rometty is the Chairwoman, President and CEO of IBM. She has been with IBM since 1981 and is the first female CEO in its history. Fortune magazine has named her among the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” for ten consecutive years; and between 2012-14 she was ranked No 1 for three years in a row. In this quote, she reminds us that true contribution is not about what we know, or even about what we do….but what we share and how we make an impact on the companies (and people) we work with, as well as the communities we serve.

#7. “How you do anything, is how you do everything.” Dr Rick Rigsby
This quote is amongst many others In Dr. Rick Rigsby’s address titled “Lessons from a 3rd grade dropout”. The lesson here is to do everything well, with full commitment and pride. If we take pride in how we do any task, we will look for and find excellence in both small and large things.

8. “To create, one must first question everything.” Eileen Gray.
Eileen Gray was a famous irish-born architect and furniture design and maker, based in France.  She lived until the mid 70s and many of her designs inspired today’s modern industrial designers. For any true innovation, we need to start from scratch. We have seen this same premise in many of the innovations of the last 20 years. From AirBNB totally reinventing travel and accomodation through to the design of the first Apple iMacs, which had colours, a shape and means of connectivity which were all radical departures from computers of their time.

#9. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein
Whenever we face a problem or opportunity, the first step is to break it down into something that is workable. I’ve always liked this quote because it reminds us to not be overwhelmed by the scale of an issue. Instead, reduce the issue down to parts which can be acted on, but do not reduce it so far that it becomes less meaningful. I’ve thought deeply about this quote when working on business strategy, designing user experiences for digital products, and creating completely new ventures.

#10. “Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world…if you do so, you are insulting yourself.” Bill Gates
In my career I’ve seen a lot of people compare themselves to others, and been left with feelings of low self-esteem and self-judgement. At the end of the day, we are each the designers of our future. We are our own measure of self-value. When we focus our energy on improving our situation, rather than comparing it to others, that’s when true change and success is possible.

#11. “Consider fully, act decisively” Jigoro Kano
Jigaro Kano was the founder of judo and a great teacher. In business and in life I have seen many decisions made too quickly, either without deep thought or without the right data. This quote reminds us to consider a decision as fully as possible within the time, information or resources that we have available to us and, once decided, act with purpose. This doesn’t mean making slow decisions (many business decisions have to be made fast); rather it’s a reminder to ensure we’re giving due consideration to the consequences of our actions, so we can make better decisions today.

Which is your favourite of these quotes? Are there others you have found helpful in your own life which are not here?nbsp; If so, please consider adding a comment below.

The post 11 Thought-Provoking Quotes About Work & Life appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

The book was Flow: The Psychology of Happiness. The author, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, studied literally thousands of people to find out the guiding principles for happiness. Part of this study also looked at the differences between people who are fully engaged in activities versus those who are not engaged (and may well be procrastinating!).

Some of the following guidance is shaped by this book, and some is from my own experience.

What ‘Flow’ Taught Me

When I first read the book I realised the characteristics of ‘peak experiences’.  Peak experiences are the times when we feel most energised, fulfilled and alive. Csikszentmihalyi calls these ‘flow’ experiences.

One of the best ways to avoid procrastination is to create the conditions for these experiences, in order to avoid boredom and overwhelm.

To create flow, we need to find a balance between the challenge involved in the task and the skill level we bring to the task.

When our skill level is up to the task (and sufficiently stretched by the task for it to be a meaningful challenge), we feel energised.

As our skill level increases, we can increase the complexity of the task. But we still need to be mindful of keeping a good balance between the task and our skill.

When these things are in balance, we can stay in the flow channel.

#1. Balance The Match Between Challenge & Your Skill In Any Task

If you want to learn a new talent, start by picking a task that matches your current skill level.

For example, if you want to draw, start by drawing a stick figure. When you’ve drawn a hundred of those, take on something more challenging.

When we repeat an action our skill level becomes better. It’s impossible to avoid. Fortunately, no one I know has become worse at something by doing it more!

Where many people come unstuck is that they select tasks that are well beyond their current range of skill.

It’s little wonder they feel deflated. And when we feel like that….guess what, we want to avoid that negative feeling. So often we procrastinate.

We substitute the pain of not being able to achieve the task, with the short term pleasure of a procrastination activity (like watching TV).

But, if we follow the rules of Flow, we would instead select tasks that are a better match with our skill level.  This gives us the best chance to see our skill grow.

This is exactly the feedback loop that is needed for skill development to be enjoyable.

I find the the ideal for me is to select tasks that are within a 15% stretch for my skill level. Any more and I’m feeding that Procrastination Gremlin. And that Gremlin sure is hungry!  Best we don’t feed it.

#2. Manage Overwhelm by Breaking Down the Activity

It’s easy to become overwhelmed by large goals.

Often these goals are the ones that are most meaningful to us, which is exactly why they’re worth accomplishing.

Instead of being overwhelmed by the magnitude of a large goal, we can simplify the goal by breaking it down into smaller steps.

If passing an exam feels too big, start by reading and summarising the first chapter of your study book. If getting a new job feels like hard work, start by creating a list of the 5 companies you would like to work for.

When we break down a larger goal into small tasks, we realise there are some smaller actions we can do to get started, right now.

#3. Separate Action & Thinking About ‘What If’

There are times to think about the future, and then there are times to just get on with it.

You’ll notice items #1 and #2 above relate to selecting the best tasks to work on. We select the right tasks by either matching the tasks with our skill or breaking down the tasks into bite size chunks.

When we’ve chosen the tasks, it’s time to focus 100% of our energy on them.

Often we start a task and then our mind wanders. We start to think about the ‘what ifs’…what if we don’t get this task done, what if we don’t succeed with the larger goal, and so on.

When we think about the ‘what ifs’ we disrupt the task we’re doing. And of course if we can’t complete the task, it’s hard to hope to achieve the larger goal.

Procrastination occurs when the small tasks we could do today, become blended with the fear of not achieving the larger goal. This creates worry and destroys our focus.  Our destroyed focus affects our ability to accomplish the task.  It’s a vicious cycle.

With mindfulness we can train ourselves to separate the activities.

When we’re doing a task, ideally we would dedicate all our energy to completing it. This might mean taking a block of time where we avoid distraction entirely (no facebook, no SMS, just doing) until the task is finished. When we have knocked off a few tasks, then we can provide permission to our mind to think about the ‘what ifs’.

It takes practice to train the mind to function like this. Train it to focus. Then train it to explore. The more we practise at separating these activities, the better the mind gets at doing them.

The post How To Avoid Procrastination & The Art of Flow appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.

I hadn’t worked with this person for a while, but I had been following their career, and I knew they were extremely talented. So it was no surprise when they told me they had been approached about a job that paid a lot more than their current role.

My friend asked me, “What should I do#8221;

“Think about the money last,” I told them.

Now I know the financial aspects of a job are important to career decisions. Very important. But I’ve also met a lot of people who uprooted their jobs for more pay, only to be disappointed because money was the only thing they thought about.

According to the research by Glassdoor and the HBR “one of the most striking results we’ve found is that, across all income levels, the top predictor of workplace satisfaction is not pay”.[1]

So what else can we think about when we’re considering a career change?  When I thought about the shifts I’ve made over the last decade, these are the five factors I came up with.

Depending where we’re at in our careers, we might weight some of these higher than others. The key is to make sure we’re giving consideration to all five.

#1. Career Prospects

A job is about more than the role. It’s about what opportunities the role will also open up in the future. Does the role give you prospects? Does it make you feel excited about the things you’ll learn on the job, the people you’ll work with, or the challenges or opportunities you’ll take on? Is the role a match with your skills, and will it also stretch you in areas you are interested in?

#2. Environment

We spend so much time during every day in our jobs. It’s important to evaluate if the environment that comes with the role will be right for you.

Questions to ask here are:

• What is the physical environment like (the offices, open spaces, light in the building; Is it fixed or flexi desk, etc)?
• What is the mental environment like (eg. is it stressful, is the business going through change, etc)?
• What is the time environment like (eg. are there standard work hours, will you be expected to work late, are their flexible hours, etc)?
• What is the culture like? Is it fun and playful, explorative, innovative. Culture is an intangible which has a tremendous influence on the level of enjoyment we have in our work. So make sure the culture is right for you and that you will be able to contribute to it.

#3. Wants/Needs

A third fundamental is to consider your own wants and needs. This is a question for you and you only.

“What do you personally need to do your best work#8221;

The answer is different for every person.

Some people love autonomy. Others love guidance.

For me, I know I need a certain level of time for free thinking. This is where I create value by doing strategic work.

Consider all the elements you need to do your best work. Write a list. This list will be a great check-sheet for whether the role will be a fit for what you’re looking for.

#4. Leadership

Someone once told me ‘people don’t leave jobs, they leave people’. To a certain extent this is true.

Chances are you will spend a great portion of your time working for the person who hires you, so it’s important you respect them and feel they’ll support you.

A great manager will challenge you just as much as they will support you.

I’ve been very fortunate in that the majority of people I’ve worked for have been incredible leaders. They’ve shown me the types of qualities I aspire to, as well as the qualities I look for in people I chose to work for.

#5. Finances

This is the last fundamental. Now I know money is important. But, too often people make decisions on this factor alone!

I’ve known people to go into well paid positions only to find they have to work 70 hour weeks.

By considering this last, it ensures we’ve devoted attention to everything else. This is extremely important for our long lasting satisfaction in a new role.

Summary

These are not all the questions you might consider when deciding on a new role. They are the ones I’ve found important. I hope you find this useful for yourself or a friend. And if you have other ideas for areas to consider, I’d love to hear them in the comments area below.

References

1. What matters more to your workforce than money, HBR, 2017.

The post 5 Factors to Consider in a Career Decision (and Why Finances is Last) appeared first on Alessio Bresciani.