| Sam Young Newsletter |
Issue 87, November 2004
Hi guys,
Feel like you are losing your way? Then check out Coaching Starts With You below for some ideas of how you can make better use of what is within yourself.
If credit card debt is a problem for you, here's a solution in How to Freeze Your Credit Card.
Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.
| Coaching Starts With You |
Not all of us have access to a personal coach. Leverage Your Best—Ditch the Rest: The Coaching Secrets Top Executives Depend On was written for us. In it, Scott Blanchard, founder of Coaching.com, and Madeline Homan, vice president of Blended Solutions at The Ken Blanchard Companies and a founder of Coaching.com, help us answer the three key questions an executive coach might ask:
- How do you see yourself?
- How do others see you?
- How do you want to be seen?
Asking the above questions, say the authors, prepares you for the fourth question:
- What strategies can I employ to make me more effective and influential?
To address this last question, say Blanchard and Homan, we need to consider both the risk of doing things differently and the type of support that will help us achieve our “prime objective.”
It's especially critical, say the authors, to identify our “tolerations”; that is, those behaviours which get in the way of our being the best that we can be. Either we don't recognise these as negative behaviours or we fail to see how much they are keeping us from success. According to the authors, still another reason for our tolerations is that we believe that it will take too much time or be inconvenient to rid ourselves of them.
Finally, say Blanchard and Homan, “We may tolerate these behaviours because we have no idea how to ditch them.” The authors suggest that we identify these obstacles to success, then develop action plans for those that we can eliminate. For example, some tolerations act like weeds on a lawn or dust bunnies under a bed—no matter how hard we work to rid ourselves of them, we need to accept that they will come back. “Not everything can be fixed,” say Blanchard and Homan. However, they add, “That often is our choice.”
Take the tolerations in business and personal relationships. According to the authors, we have it within ourselves to put an end to troublesome relationships. We can cope with personal issues by bringing them to the surface. On the job, we can put an end to turf battles or substandard performance by our staff members. Admittedly, it can be unpleasant to address them, but eliminating draining or unsupportive people in our lives can significantly bring us closer to being able to leverage our talents.
The authors don't suggest that executive coaches are unnecessary, but they do suggest that many changes in our lives begin with a simple willingness to change.
This article was originally published by the American Management Association (AMA). You can find out more about joining AMA at http://www.amamember.org/profdev/index.htm
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Apparently - well, according to Morning Report, anyway - New Zealander's lag well behind Australians with their credit card use. Only 60% of us use credit cards for everyday purchases like groceries and petrol. Hmmm...!
Gosh, and while we are talking about that 60%, a very large chunk of the sixty-percenters don't pay off their credit card each month. In fact, they run it close to the maximum all the time, clocking up very stiff interest charges and thinking of that piece of plastic as being another bank account - not as being dosh that they owe.
Those people pay around 18-19% on an average of about $8k. That's around $1800 compound per annum. Hardly worth it, is it?!
While the credit card companies will love you, it is not a smart way of turning money into more money. Sounds more like turning debt into more debt.
But you can make a credit card work well for you. If you set up an automatic payment with the bank each month and pay back the ENTIRE amount on your credit card each month, you gain yourself thirty days bank interest on your cash that you haven't yet used to pay for your groceries, petrol and haircuts. You earn credit card loyalty or air points. Effectively you get paid to use your credit card - and you aren't buying any credit card company corporate lunches at fancy restaurants.
So how do you turn things around if you are a person who funds the credit card companies' corporate lunches? Providing you can be disciplined enough to not use your card when it is still in your possession, give this a try;
- Magnet-fix your credit card account on the freezer door and highlight the total owing
- Fill a plastic container half full of water. Put it in the freezer. Once it is frozen, but your credit card in it and then fill it the rest of the way up with water. Stashing the container at the bottom of one of the least used freezer drawers
- Work out your finances. Budget the MOST that you can pay off your credit card each month. Set this amount up by automatic payment
- DO NOT USE YOUR CREDIT CARD
- Get on the internet & read what Consumer has to say about prudent credit card use
- Fix each new monthly statement to the fridge - with the total highlighted - to the freezer door. Work out how much interest you saved this month & write that on the statement as well
- When you have paid off the entire amount - BEFORE you unfreeze your credit card - organise a direct debit authority for your credit card company to clear the entire amount outstanding each month
- Unfreeze your card & use it to make all your purchases during the month, continually checking to ensure that there is enough in your current account to cover the payment at the due date
- Give yourself a big pat on the back. Welcome to the world of grown-ups!
If you feel that can't do this on your own, give your card to a friend and have your credit card statement on THEIR freezer door. It may motivate you even more :-)
| Copying Your Contacts |
Need to copy your contacts from your work Outlook Contacts list to your home PC and stumped as to how you can do it? Want to pass some of your contacts on to a business associate or share family contacts?
Outlook itself doesn't make it easy for you now. Whereas once, in Outlook 2000 and earlier, you could put a shortcut on your "Outlook Bar" to a system folder, and could merely drag & drop contacts, emails and tasks names out from within the Outlook.pst file.
There are a couple of ways to do this in Outlook XP;
- Emailing a few Contacts;
- Open Outlook and go to the Contacts pane
- Highlight all the contacts that you want to copy or circulate (use the Ctrl key to select multiple contact files)
- Right click & select "Forward" from the pop-up menu
- Enter the desired email address & send
- When the email arrives, open each contact & click save. They will automatically save into your Contacts list.
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- Copying your Contacts list;
- Open both Windows Explorer and Outlook. Close all other programmes
- On the Windows task bar (at the very bottom of the screen with the start button in it), right click anywhere on some blank grey space and select "Tile Windows Vertically" from the pop-up menu. You will now have explorer open on half of the screen & Outlook open on the other
- Go to the Contacts pane in Outlook
- Ctrl & A to select all your contacts
- Ctrl & C to copy them to the Windows clipboard
- In the Windows Explorer window, navigate to the folder that you want to copy all your contacts to. Select the folder
- Ctrl & P to paste the contacts
NB: if you have any contacts with the same name, one will over-write the other. Take note of these contacts and change the names (eg, "Bert Smith - Home" and "Bert Smith - Work") or you will not have copies of them -
Have fun!
| TLAs for SMEs |
Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you;
- iSCSI, Internet Small Computer System Interface. An IP-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities via WAN, LAN or internet.
- IP, Internet Protocol.
- SAN, Storage Area Network. A high-speed special-purpose sub-network which connects a range of data storage devices to data servers for a larger network of users
Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.
| Short+Hot Keys... and now tips |
Over the next few newsletters, we are going to look at all you can do in Outlook. This time we focus on what you can do with the arrow keys & Shift;
- Outlook "Change the duration of the selected block of time when working in day/week/month view" Shift & Arrow Keys
- Outlook "Extend the selected items by one item when working in a table or extend the selection to the next card or to unselect cards before the starting point" Shift & Down Arrow
- Outlook "Select or unselect one character to the left or select several adjacent items on a timeline" Shift & Left Arrow
- Outlook "Select or unselect one character to the right or select several adjacent items on a timeline" Shift & Right Arrow
- Outlook "Reduce the selection to the previous card and unselect cards after the starting point or reduce the selected time when working in the day/week/month view" Shift & Up Arrow
| Hot Linx |
Want to know how to behave on a business trip in Germany (in both English & German)? Then check out http://www.german-business-etiquette.com/
Ever had a play with a pin hole camera? If not, take a look at the practical instructions on this webpage at http://www.pinholephotography.org/camera obscurer.htm
Need an advertising slogan without doing the work? Then head off to the Advertising Slogan Generator at The Surrealist website - http://www.thesurrealist.co.uk/slogan - punch in your key word & get ready to have a laugh
Want to liven up your publications and need some free fonts? Check out Larabie's website for free fonts at http://www.larabiefonts.com/fonts/a.html
Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here
