#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

I'm not here to patronize you.  We know if you walk with better posture, force a fake smile, or get a new haircut you can trick your brain and boost your self-confidence.  Perhaps for 20 minutes you'll think you're the next Richard Branson. 

I'm here to tell you there are proven ways to improve your self-confidence that will drive real, long lasting change in your life.

Are you a successful leader? This is a difficult question to answer: No matter how good you think you are, the only evidence of leadership is whether people follow you. Self-serving bias distorts your perception of your own successes and failures. Even if you’re incredibly self-aware, you may have trouble with an objective assessment because your direct reports may only appear to be following — they don’t get an option to be physically present — and not every company conducts rigorous engagement surveys or 360-degree reviews.

So how can you gain a reasonably accurate understanding of your success as a leader? Try integrating three distinctive views.

Do you care about your job? No, you know, really care.

Do you care so much that you will defend your company's product at dinner parties when someone mentions that it snapped in two on first use?

Or do you mumble: "Yeah, we cut back on manufacturing costs for a little more profit. You can't blame us, can you?"?

I muse on this because there's a certain trend for companies to take themselves a little more seriously. By "more seriously" I mean focusing on something other than pristine clean lucre and the CEO's large cut of it.

Something akin to a larger purpose, for example.

This means that in hiring staff, they're increasingly looking for people who are able to have -- or even have naturally -- higher goals than mere money-making.

I’m sure you’ve seen the articles on things you can do — independently — to bolster your career prospects. You can take steps to get more face time with your boss, you can volunteer to take ownership over projects and you can develop other talents on the side.

But the thing is: Advancements aren’t all you, you, you. In other words, I’m sure several of the job descriptions you've seen call for a “team player,” and in job interviews, you you may have been asked to describe how you work with others.

So even if you nail your solo tasks, you still have to be able to work with a group.

The best way to invite good new things into your life is to make room for them. Just as you declutter your office and home, from time to time do a check and throw out anything that isn't helping you make your success achievable.

Here are some good places to start.

Finish this sentence: “Before I launch a new product, send my resume to a potential employer, or finalize a speech to deliver in front of the whole company, I want to make sure it’s ____.”

Maybe you said “engaging” or “spell-checked” or “approved by my boss.”

But my guess is that the majority of you finished that sentence with the same word: “perfect.”

As humans, the need to strive for perfection is ingrained in us. You can see it in the way we look up to successful people: We expect the people we hold in high regard—like managers, CEOs, or political candidates—to be perfect, without a single flubbed answer or ill-conceived business decision.

So it’s no wonder that when you’re striving to be successful, you’re simultaneously striving for perfection.

Which is a big, fat waste of time.

When you want to move up in the workplace, your first instinct might be to ask yourself, “What can I add to my plate to impress people and really prove my worth around here?”

That may seem like a smart question to ponder, but in my opinion, it’s not always the right question to start off with.

Instead, here’s a good place to start: “What can I subtract from my current workload so that I can clear away some muck, free up my time and energy, and start contributing at the highest possible level?”

In other words: “What should I be doing less of around here?”

After working as a psychologist and life coach for over 28 years--mentoring super-achievers across all kinds of industries--what I have observed, time and time again, is that the secret to success isn’t doing more. It’s doing less.

Here is a simple auditing exercise to help you critically examine your work week and decide which tasks to keep--and which you ought to delete.

There have been several books written about the subject of happiness including several from Tal Ben-Shahar ("Happier", "Even Happier" and "Being Happy") and Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh who wrote Delivering Happiness. All great books if you're looking for a deep dive into the subject of happiness. But I came across a quote from the Dalai Lama XIV that really nailed it for me:

Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.

There are a ton of qualities that can help you succeed, and the more carefully a quality has been studied, the more you know it's worth your time and energy.

Angela Lee Duckworth was teaching seventh grade when she noticed that the material wasn't too advanced for any of her students. They all had the ability to grasp the material if they put in the time and effort. Her highest-performing students weren't those who had the most natural talent; they were the students who had that extra something that motivated them to work harder than everyone else.

Angela grew fascinated by this "extra something" in her students and, since she had a fair amount of it herself, she quit her teaching job so that she could study the concept while obtaining a graduate degree in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Her study, which is ongoing, has already yielded some interesting findings. She's analyzed a bevy of people to whom success is important: students, military personnel, salespeople, and spelling bee contestants, to name a few. Over time, she has come to the conclusion that the majority of successful people all share one critical thing--grit.

Grit is that "extra something" that separates the most successful people from the rest. It's the passion, perseverance, and stamina that we must channel to stick with our dreams until they become a reality.

You not only have an up-to-date profile, but you also have a stellar headline, plenty of endorsements and a photo that manages to make you look both professional and approachable. So you’re all set on that front, right?

Nope! Think again. The company recently rolled out a few new features that you should know about if you want to take full advantage of the platform. Especially if one of your goals this year involves getting a new job, improving your personal brand, or just maximizing the usefulness of LinkedIn in general.

Accomplishments are based on actions, not on thoughts--yet the thought is always father to the deed. Achievement starts with an idea, a perspective, a point of view, or even just an attitude. (Ideas, perspectives, and points of view like these, for starters.)

Here are some of the things extraordinarily successful people say every day--and how those statements spur them to take actions that lead to even greater success:

How much do you believe in yourself? For most of the answer is: not enough. Instead of looking proudly at our accomplishments, we focus on the things we haven't yet done, and on the mistakes we've made. No wonder we find it hard to pitch big clients and investors, sell ourselves as the best, or demand the pay we deserve.

The problem is that many of us take an unrealistically negative view of ourselves and our work, says executive coach and bestselling author Wendy Capland. "We teeter between thinking 'I'm not enough,' and 'I'm not even ready to be enough,'" she says. 

But we don't have to stay there. There are simple things we all can do to get a more clear-eyed--and positive--view of ourselves and our accomplishments. And then, Capland says, "We can step into who we already are."

Here are some simple techniques that work well for Capland's clients, and for Capland herself. Try them next time you need to increase your own confidence:

Think about the people you know who are successful in their personal and professional lives. Were they born destined for success? How do they make reaching goals that most would consider completely unfeasible seem so easy?

It's not fate. Instead, they all have one thing in common: resilience. The good news is we all have it in us. All we have to do is learn to develop and utilize it.

Sometimes, being asked the right question at the right moment is a powerful motivator. Case in point: My dad said to me at college graduation, "We know what you can do. But who are you going to be?" At the time, I wanted a job and hadn’t yet realized how connected employment is with happiness and life’s purpose. I was a bit too hungover to come up with a good answer in the moment. However, the question stuck with me, and it resurfaces when I'm off-track.

There are very few stories of success that don't start with at least a few failures along the way. But certainly not everyone who fails succeeds. Failure can easily turn into an insurmountable hurdle that can stop you in your tracks.

So what's the difference between those who let failure stop them from reaching their goals and those who turn failure into a giant success? It has to do with the way they respond to adversity. Here are five ways to turn failure into a giant success:

In hard times, you need to make tough decisions for the sake of your business. Most importantly, you need the right people by your side. But how do you identify the people who will turn your business around? What are the characteristics of these "A players" that make them so critical?

I learned the hard way when the bubble burst in 2001 and LivePerson, like all other tech companies, was losing clients fast. We were forced to reduce our staff by more than half--from 180 down to 80.