Three essential questions to ask each quarter

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• Three essential questions to ask yourself each quarter

• Vary your voice pace to optimise the energy in the room

• Avoid task hoarding

• Humor for fun and profit

• Jeff Bezos as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

Three essential questions to ask yourself

CareerCoacha encourages us to work on our careers. Each quarter it is worth asking yourself the following three questions:

1. What is inspiring you in your job?

This could be your colleagues, customers, suppliers, or even your competitors. It could be an aspect of your job that is fun. Or your role in a team that is achieving excellence.

2. What are you doing well in your job?

Knowing what you do well reinforces your earned self-confidence. This is invaluable to build resilience for when inevitable setbacks occur. Knowing your strengths and accomplishments means you might be able to leverage them more.

3. What would you like to do better in your job?

A growth mindset means striving for ongoing improvement. We can strive for kaizen. Stretching, and re-stretching, our standards and goals means we stay relevant and competitive in the job market.

COMMUNICATION

Vary your voice pace

We make our speech more dynamic and engaging for our audience when we vary our voice pace.

It is useful to speak faster when we want to:

⚡ Indicate our urgency

⚡ Express excitement

⚡ Inject energy into a room

It is useful to speak slower when we want to:

🧘‍♂️ Indicate our calmness

🧘‍♂️ Allow a point to resonate

🧘‍♂️ Soothe the mood of a room

If we speak too fast we may project nervousness. If we speak too slowly we may bore our audience. Great storytellers vary their voice pace in each gathering to hold the attention of their audience.

PRODUCTIVITY

Avoid task hoarding

Several years ago, I coached the CFO of a property developer who did not want to delegate. She compounded this task hoarding by exerting control of the HR and IT functions. In her annual 360 review she was described as being: ‘a bottleneck’, ‘stretched too thin’ and a ‘micro-manager’. Coaching made little difference. Management guidance by her CEO made little difference. Eventually the CFO was exited from the business.

Some of us have the maladaptive opinion that if you want a task done well then do it yourself. This leads to task hoarding. It leads to under-leveraging our talent and energy and those of our colleagues. Rather than making us indispensable, it makes us a long-term risk to the business. Relinquishing and sharing tasks is liberating for us - we get to focus on the core mandate of our job. We get to leverage our strengths. When we share tasks with colleagues we are communicating ’I trust you.’

1 MINUTE TO HAPPINESS

Humor for fun and profit

A strong motivator for most of us is the positive emotions we experience with colleagues. A peak work experience is to laugh with team mates. Humor, laughter, and fun bring us great happiness. Negative humor like ridicule and sarcasm is destructive to relationships and best avoided. Positive humor is a virtue because:

• Fun and laughter releases the feel-good chemical dopamine. Dopamine also enables learning, creativity, and memory.

• Humor is a coping strategy for stress and adversity. This helps us and our teams be more resilient.

• Joking, especially self-deprecatory humor, can defuse conflict. We enhance relationships when we respond well to the bids of others to de-escalate tension with a joke.

• Laughter has multiple physical benefits. It activates our diaphragm, stimulating our lungs and bringing more oxygenated air. Laughter is also correlated with improved immunity, reduced pain, and better sleep.

• Fun at work increases productivity. Positive organizations and teams are less likely to experience burnout. We work harder and smarter when we want to be around our colleagues.

GET SMARTER

Jeff Bezos as career coach

Jeff Bezos is the Executive Chair of Amazon and the second richest person in the world. He graduated from Princeton with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. Bezos embodiies a growth mindset. He emphasises being pioneering, experimenting, and continuing to evolve:

If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please let us know by replying to this email.

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