There are times when how the work was completed overshadows that the work was completed.

We all get weary. We all experience boredom, stress, and fatigue among other difficulties at work.

Very few of us can simply override these feelings by sheer force of will, working with as much vigor, enthusiasm and effort as we would in the best of times.

We need a way to stay in the game when work and life pressures are weighing heavily on our spirits.

Who would you give the promotion to? The person who is engaged or the person who is distracted? The person who is taking the initiative or the person who is doing the bare minimum?

Who would you give the job to? The person who believes in their ability to make a meaningful contribution or the person who is trying to get away from a bad supervisor? The person who is eager to jump in with both feet, or the person who wants to know how much overtime is expected?

We need a way to hold ourselves with poise and a comfortable confidence. We need a way to stay interested and engaged. We need a way to restore our energies and inject new life into our efforts.

Denying our weariness, our anger, or our frustrations is not a realistic path forward. Pretending to be someone we are not usually is pretty transparent and awkward.

Our best bet is to be totally honest with ourselves about the reasons and causes of our low spirits. Get it all out on the table. (A private, confidential table, of course.) And then begin addressing those factors one at a time.

Two things will happen.

One, you will immediately feel better about yourself merely because you are taking action. Before any of the difficulties have even begun to be resolved or changed, you will find energy in the dignity and power of choosing to take care of yourself and take decisive action.

Two, your focus will shift off of the debilitating fatigue, bitterness, or other feelings that are overwhelming you to developing ideas for changing the underlying causes of those feelings.

It is one thing to feel fatigue and be honest about it. It is another thing altogether to identify that the feeling arises from non-stop busyness. I can do something about being busy all of the time. I can commit to taking breaks. I can plan a relaxing weekend away. I can buy tickets for next summer’s vacation now, so that I will be financially committed before circumstances can talk me out of yet another vacation.

I am not suggesting that these choices are either obvious or easy to make. I am asserting that once they become specific choices  instead of vague feelings, your experience of your feelings will change from that of overwhelm and powerlessness to one of possibilities and personal power.

The shift will show up in your attitude. Your approach will become more constructive. Your energy levels will pick up. You are no longer a passive victim of a difficult job. You are an active player who has a difficult job.

How about you? What do you do to stay in the game even if you feel like you’re losing? What do you do to restore your energy levels and adjust your attitude when the job and life weighs heavy on you?

On your side,

- Karl Edwards

Loving Monday is a weekly column designed to encourage us to step into our weeks with an intention to show up authentically, engage fully, and choose to make it a good week for ourselves. Explore past columns here.

As if looking for work wasn’t stressful enough.

Interviews can be nerve-wracking affairs. No matter how mutual you try to make the exchange, there is no getting away from the fact that the hiring person has the job and you don’t.

As a result of this power differential, we can easily feel that we are the only one on trial, the only one being evaluated, the only one with much at stake.

Mike King is someone I keep my eye on. He has put together an almost overwhelming list of 100 interview tips. You can find it at: “100 Ways to Ace an Interview” on his web site Learn This.

Suggestion for benefiting from King’s list
Read quickly through the list paying special attention to your initial responses as you do so.

1. Which three tips seem most immediately helpful to you?
   Decide how you will incorporate these three ideas into your next interview.
2. Which three tips were brand new or surprising thoughts for you?
   Reflect on what you might be able to learn from these three tips.
3. With which three tips do you disagree most?
   Disagreement is often a clue to an important value of your own. What underlying values of yours do these three tips violate?

We want to be playing at the top of our game when interviewing. Playing at the top of one’s game, though, does not mean play-acting. It means showing up fully yourself and comfortably yourself.

Click here for Mike King’s “100 Ways to Ace an Interview.”

On your side,

- Karl Edwards

Having a bad job can wear one down, but having no job can wear one out.

The experience of repeated rejections is difficult not to make personal and internalize.

We lose confidence. We lose energy. We begin to think that we might be the problem and not the economy.

It is in this situation that Monday becomes a weekly opportunity to pause and remind ourselves of the truth. The truth about ourselves, our skills, our capabilities and our character. The truth about the job market. 12% unemployment is unparalleled in our working lives. This is no ordinary cyclical recession that we can wait out.

The title of the column, “Loving Monday,” almost sounds like someone is mocking our pain. How can we love beginning another week of hustling ourselves to a working world that has curled up into a fetal position in the corner until some undisclosed future time when it feels safe to make commitments again?

The truth, though, is that you are a valuable professional. You bring a marvelous set of skills, perspectives, experiences, personality, attitude, and competencies.

Regardless of the economic reality by which so many businesses find themselves constrained, you have value. Enormous value.

This fact is the truth that needs to be reengaged each Monday morning as you launch another strenuous week of telephone calls, letters, emails, coffees, lunches, networking efforts, and interviews.

While always tiring, while sometimes discouraging, while occasionally depressing, our continued job hunting efforts nonetheless give credence to the larger truth. The truth that we have value.

If you need a more personal reminder of the deeper truth of your value, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

On your side,

- Karl Edwards

Loving Monday is a weekly column designed to encourage us to step into our weeks with an intention to show up authentically, engage fully, and choose to make it a good week for ourselves. Explore past columns here.

What now?

The hours of helpful (and not so helpful) seminars, the miles we walked on the trade floor, the networking parties, and the innumerable conversations with vendors, future partners and potential customers. We are hopefully inspired. We might be overwhelmed. We are definitely exhausted.

We came away with many new ideas. Maybe too many! Maybe just enough so that once we get back into the grind of our busy lives, we don’t find our way to act on any of these great ideas.

It is too easy to leave all those great ideas in that closed notebook on the desk. Too often we never get around to sifting through the computer files where we stored those ingenious tidbits that were going to transform our business.

Here are 7 trajectories of action that you can use to guide your after-the-show efforts.

1. Attitude Boost

Participating and persevering in a still-emerging industry during a struggling economy requires courage, passion, and energy.

Select one source of inspiration from the expo that resonated deeply with the challenges you face. What is one way you can transform that model, story, and/or attitude into a vehicle to recharge your juices, restore your confidence and/or rededicate your efforts?

Take action to boost and reinforce your attitude for the work ahead.

2. Personal Branding

Feeling your blog is lost in a crowded sea of exponentially expanding bloggers, consultants, experts, celebrities and companies?

Which one or two speakers at BlogWorld do you remember most clearly? Why do you think the memory is so clear? How do they describe themselves in their title, on their web site, in their materials? List three attributes that make you and your services distinct from everyone else? What is the main thing you want to be know for?

Take action to clarify your primary identity as a distinct contributor in your field.

3. Network Connections

Sometime meeting a hundred people is as good as meeting no one. And yet connections, referrals, partnerships and new business come through relationships.

Go through the business cards you collected from the expo and find the person with whom you connected most deeply. It could be someone who was particularly easy to talk with, someone who was an intriguing example, someone with similar interests, or someone you would like to get to know better. Give them a call this week. Find out what their main take-away from BlogWorld was. Find out what their top goal for this next year is.

Take action to reach out and show interest in a new connection.

4. Strategy Adjustment

The alert entrepreneur is learning and adjusting all the time. While we need to persevere in our efforts, perseverance does not mean stiff-necked, rigid unwillingness to change.

What is one new strategy, approach or product you saw at BlogWorld that might inform your strategy, approach or products? What do you see or understand now that you didn’t see or understand before the expo?

Take action and try one thing differently and do so over the next month.

5. Product Development

It could be an e-book, a workbook, a webinar, a web-based self-study course, a podcast, a software package, a consulting package, etc. etc. You get the idea.

How narrow or broad are your product offerings? What are you currently offering your clients that could be repackaged to meet a different set of needs, audience, or price range?

Select one of your products and develop a low-cost low commitment version of it and then a high-cost high commitment version. The low cost version could be used as a way to build credibility and trust with new connections. The high cost version could be a way to work more deeply and extensively with your current clients.

Take action to repackage one of your products for different uses or different segments of people.

6. Web Site Simplicity

If I came to your web site, would it be completely obvious how you wanted to serve me? Would it be self-evident how I could buy your product or get in touch with you?

Which presenter at BlogWorld impressed you the most? Take a look at their web site and write your own critique. What gets your attention? What is confusing? What is especially clear and attractive? What is hard to find?

Use your critique of that site as a lens now to evaluate your own web site. What is one change can you make right now that will clarify to visitors how you can help solve their problem?

Take action to simplify and focus your home page for brand clarity and response ease.

7. Social Web Involvement

Do you feel like you’re tossing your blog posts into the wind? Putting your wise words out there for the world, and yet not really knowing who you’re helping beyond some anonymous stats.

At BlogWorld we received a wealth of information, models, modes and mean of getting connected more relationally and interactively on the web. Which presenter was an attractive model of the sort of interactivity you would like to experience on the web? Go to their site and watch how they are generating conversation, interacting with their audience, and asking people to buy their services.

Read three other quality blogs in your field. Contribute brief and insightful comments to their posts regularly. Write an occasional blog post of your own highlighting/directing people to one of their excellent posts.

Take action to interact with others in your field on a regular basis.

Now What?

Depending on how much time and energy you have, here are three levels of action you can take to act on what you learned from BlogWorld. Consider yourself a success if you can follow through on any one of these options.

A. Select only one of the above trajectories of action to work with. For that one category what was the most exciting, most relevant, biggest impact idea you came away with from BlogWorld 2010? Write down what you will do this week to take action on that idea.

B. Do the same thing for your top three trajectories of action. In addition to deciding what you will do this week, also write down where you want to be in three months for those three action trajectories.

C. Design a brainstorming grid for all seven trajectories of action. Transfer all your conference take-aways to post-it notes and sort them by trajectory. Next start moving the post-its around according to priority. Those at the top are what you will act on immediately. Those in the middle will be those you will act on over the next three months. Those at the bottom are those that you will accomplish over the next year.

Do something. Anything. Do at least one thing in response to your experience at BlogWorld 2010.

You’ll thank yourself. (And so will those who will ultimately benefit from you doing so!)

On your side,

- Karl Edwards

Sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with Karl Edwards here.
Get an objective, supportive, and helpful set of eyes on your brand distinctives, career objectives, leadership effectiveness, or team dynamics.

Having enjoyed a multi-faceted career, I could easily buy into any of the many interpretations others have provided to make sense of the diversity of roles I have held through the years. Interpretations, that is, that come from a particular frame of reference that Malcolm Gladwell explores in this week’s chapter on “Late Bloomers.”

Multiple roles could be a symptom of being lost. Unable to find my way, my calling, my destiny, I could be moving from role to role in search of something that feels like home.

I could be a loser of sorts. Kidding myself into believing that I am God’s gift to humanity. I don’t see that my personality grates, my skills are archaic, and my working style is neither productive nor helpful.

I could have my priorities mixed up. Preferring to inaugurate entirely new visions of capitalism for the 21st century, I neglect being a stable, domestic provider who makes sure that each week’s expenses corresponds with a particular paycheck that covers them.

What if, though, I were exactly where I belonged during each stage of my professional journey so far? What if the only way forward is to take another step? What about uncharted territory where the path only becomes visible when looking back at where we have been?

When experience is one of life’s teachers, then the knowledge, experience and connections needed to see which path to take can only be found in actually proceeding down a path. In the doing is the learning, the adjusting, the maturing.

Gladwell’s insight into our culture’s fallacious assumption that genius comes early and easily is a breath of fresh air to those of us who experience the world so startlingly different that we struggle to find vocabulary, context and/or means to communicate, persuade and create all that burns deep within.

This week’s chapter seemed written especially for me. Give it a read. It might be especially for you too.

You never know. You or I may be the next, “Cézanne.”

Join the conversation. What was your main take-away from this chapter?

Each week I post my reflections from one chapter of What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. If you are just joining the discussion now, welcome! Catch up on the entire series here.

I am a novice at being someone else. Anyone else. Even someone else from whom I might have a lot to learn.

Yet so many consultants, coaches and career counselors are advising us that we need to be someone other than ourselves.

“If you want the job.” “If you’re serious about the promotion.” “If you want to negotiate well.”

I find myself over-thinking interview and sales situations. I am managing both a conversation with the person I am with as well as a conversation with myself about how I am going about the conversation with the other person.

How can I possible be fully present with someone when I am preoccupied with talking to myself?

I’m not! is the answer I pretty consistently receive from those willing to tell me.

Key for me has been realizing that I am an incredible expert on being myself. The task doesn’t require any more thinking. I can give my full attention to the issue on the table and the people I am with.

When I let go of the need to impress, to appear unrealistically competent, or to artificially mirror the qualifications of an attractive job description, I am free to come alive in the skin within which I am most comfortable—my own.

I make a very attractive “me.” Even if I’m not a fit or match for every client, job or interview, I will come across infinitely better as myself than any image of competence I might be tempted to put on.

It’s simply much easier to be oneself.

On your side,

- Karl Edwards

Keeping It Real is the column where I share what I myself am learning. Beware of the leader who is not always learning themselves!

The connotation is everything.

Being distinct adds to our value. Being odd detracts.

Being distinct means that you bring something to the table that no one else does. Being odd means that you bring something to the table that no one else wants.

Our distinctives are attributes of which we are proud, aware, and take care to maximize. Our oddities are attributes about which we remain silent, are often unaware, and pop up when we least expect them.

When looking for work, we want to be well versed in and comfortably articulate about our distinctives. These unique attributes add value to the working community and increase our attractiveness as a candidate.

Your distinctness may just be what separates you from the competition and gets you the job.

Try this exercise. Write out as many of your personal attributes as you can think of. Keep writing until you’re exhausted and then add twenty more.

Then go through the list and circle the ten that relate best to the specific job for which you are applying. Finally, of those ten, highlight the one to three attributes that might be unique to you or are specialties of yours.

Now you have a few specific attributes to talk about with a prospective employer. They may turn out to be distinct attributes. They may turn out to be what distinguishes you from the other applicants.

Your distinctives make you attractive. Your oddities… well… let’s just say, focus on the positive.