1. Immediate Relatives and Friends – A young sales person will usually get the immediate family members to be his first customer.  This will follow by his relatives then friends, and then uh-oh… he is out of networks… Personally, I wouldn’t recommend selling to your relatives unless it is a really fantastic product that really benefits your relatives.  Picture this; if the product (1) wasn’t what your relative wanted in the first place or (2) does not prove it is beneficial or worth to your relative, you will be labelled for life for selling crappy products to them.  That will leave you with two choice, either stand up to the possible mockery in future or be absent from family gatherings.  But of course, not all failure stories end up that way.  However, if what you sold was genuinely good for them, then that is a plus point and they will propagate the benefits to their friends becoming your strong first line network!
2. Reconnect with long lost friends – Take time to look through the list of old friends.  Those during your college days, your previous company or friends from the old neighbourhood.  Browse through social network sites that you have accounts in and see if your friends are there.  You will be surprise at how your friends have grown and changed over time.  That point aside, do some catching up through online chats or an email.  Be genuinely interested in the events of life that they have gone through and not blast your latest offers immediately.  It is easier to link up with old friends as there are common topics to talk about.  This reconnection can reveal a network of different expertise or help that you need (but do not know where to find).
3. Get to know more friends at work – Have conversation with colleagues of a different team.  Arrange lunches with colleagues from those teams.  Not only you break the boring routine of having lunch with the same group of colleagues, you get to know what you do not (or may not know) that is happening (rumours) in the company, open new problem solving ideas and build links (and trust) to with another department!  Birds of the same feather fly in a flock.  It holds certain truth in this phrase.  You will have the same mentality (group culture) if you persist to stick with the same group of friends.  By interacting more with peers of different teams, you build a supportive network and trust and will be useful when an inter-team effort is required!
4. Build relationship by extending your current ones – Lastly, from your existing relatives, friends and colleagues, always take the opportunity to find out more about friends of friends, friends of relatives, friends of colleagues, etc… you know what I mean.  Get to know your friends and his friends.  Take the opportunity to build a relationship with this possible new friend.  Ask to be included in their next friends meet up sessions or even propose to link up with this new friend yourself!  This will help you expand your existing network to a bigger one!

These are just ways to build a strong network to support your goals.  Remember, network is your net worth!  So how do you build your strong network?

1. Capitalize your strengths! – By delegating your tasks out.  Those mandate, boring and those that you feel unhappy about, you get to focus on those tasks that are strategic, exciting and you feel a sense of achievement doing it.  Why?  You are actually working on things that capitalize on your strengths!  When you are capitalizing on your strength, you feel good as you learn faster and complete work faster.  This creates a “always winning” feeling!  The more you win, the more you likely to be productive doing it!
2. You feel great! – Let’s be honest with each other, nobody will be happy working on something that they dislike.  When something that you dislike is being delegated out (especially those that can dragged for days), you would not feel bore down thinking that a pending (boring) task is your to-do list.  However, given that you had delegated out the boring tasks (those that you feel boring working at), now you are left with tasks that you like to do, and you will feel great with these tasks!
3. Boosts team communication! – This is the time to communicate with your colleagues.  Find out what they are doing AND what they are doing best. Find out if they like to work on something else or alternative work options instead of what they are currently too.  You be surprised!  They may be your answer to your problems.  Why?  They may want to take on those tasks that you are not keen working on but they are unsure how to approach you.  They may want to have a share of your work to boost their career profile!  Furthermore, through this communication, you get to know your colleagues and they get to know you better too!
4. You are not the right person to do it – Sometimes, you may not be the right authority to perform the assigned task.  You may not be in the right department to handle the task too.  The problem here is you do not know how to say “no” and pass on to someone else.  You blindly accept the task and handle it alone.  That is not the correct way to approach the task.  Find out if you should be doing it in the first place.  Hand it to someone that has the capability to handle it or the right position to handle it.

With all these reasons (and those mentioned in Achieve Personal Productivity Through Delegation!), it is really beneficial to start delegating tasks to your colleagues.  It will be unwise to put a boundary on delegation.  You never know how much benefit you can reap off through delegation. Keep options opened if tasks are assigned to you.  You will be surprise that your colleagues may want to have a share of your work to help them boost their career profile.  You never know too! J

1. You get work done faster than what yourself can – The first benefit of delegation, is things will move faster than you would when you do it alone.  Things will be completed faster as you distribute tasks and allow them to run concurrent to what you are doing.
2. You need not work on task that you find boring or unhappy handling it – The second benefit of delegation!  The boring mandate tasks are assigned to someone to do it.  You may not like the tasks assigned to you but somebody may like it.  You will be surprised that your colleague actually loves the printing of the sales documents or preparing the travel documents for you.  It is strange but it is true.  With something that is boring to you (where you will be unproductive doing something you do not like) being delegated out, now, you can focus on things that can keep you happy thus bringing up your morale and productivity.
3. You can focus on things that are strategic – When the boring and mandate tasks (in your perspective) are assigned to colleagues who love doing it, you are not free to focus on the things that are important to you.  Now, you have more time to meet strategic clients, business development, build relationship or attend to your customer’s needs!
4. You may uncover things that you may have missed out if you were to perform the task alone – Through delegation, with someone who is passionate about the delegated task, he may be able to uncover loop holes to the task and may manage the task better than you if you were to be doing it alone.

A word of caution, delegation may seem to be the choice for personal productivity.  It works really well when the task delegated fits directly with the prospective colleague.  However, most of the time, it is not the case.  Chances are likely that you will face resistance from the colleague as he will be taking on more responsibilities.

Another point that you should be careful is the abuse of delegation.  Delegation is not about shifting responsibilities.  It is to allow you to be free of work that is counter-productive to your overall productivity.  You will still need to hold responsibility of the output delivered from the delegate colleague.  If you have the mentality that delegation is shifting responsibilities (and put blame on others when they cannot deliver), unfortunately, this is the incorrect way to view delegation.

We hope you can see the benefits of delegation in relation with personal productivity.  A good fit in the delegated task is the key component to delegation.  With much boring, unhappy, mandate, etc type of tasks been freed up, now you can work on more meaningful and important tasks that will greatly enhance your personal productivity!

Today, we are presenting an individualistic idea that will suit you when it comes down to the decision making.  Which means some might feel it is selfish idea or against their principles.  Whatever the case it’s fine with us.  Take it at face value and have a thought about it.  We must recognize one thing that is the pension days are gone.  Loyalty is not a selling point in keeping talents to stay.  It is the cash power that the organisation is willing to give to those that perform.  Therefore, think for yourself when you need to make a decision or take on tasks.

When you are assigned a new task, will it benefit you in anyway?  Example, the task is to track all employees’ daily activities.  Is this a task that is beneficial to you?  Does it help in your career progression?  When the time comes that you need to leave the organisation, can you put in the resume stating that you “track all employees’ daily activities” and have accomplishments such as, “I’ve caught 2 employees surfing Facebook daily”?  Of course, there are ways to package your job responsibilities in your resume in future.  But at the baseline, does such task bring any value to you?

Think if your organisation or your business function was to be disperse (be it for whatever reasons, such as sales is bad, merger and acquisition, or no longer find it strategic to continue the business function) and you need to leave (made to leave) the organisation, can you list down your selling points as a prospective employee with full of skill set?  What will they think if of you with your current job responsibilities?  Will your work experience (and the decisions make to contribute to the work experience) be useful to your prospective employer?  Think about what the market out there is wanting!

And remember, your decision is accountable to your family.  Of course, your decision may be accountable to your organisation.  But when you are being removed from the organisation, you no longer need to be accountable to them (you might even curse and swear at them!).  Instead, you are now accountable to your family in bringing the cash to feed them!  Do you have the right skill set to secure a new job and feed them?

The principles here are individualistic.  You work for yourself and your family.  Some may argue that this is a selfish mindset and hinders organisation progression or do not consider the emotions of other colleagues.  Agreed and disagreed.  Take this advice at face value and do things that you deem fit.  It’s not a 100% perfect solution and you might want to tune it here and there to make it perfect for you (and your character).  At the baseline, we are advising you that whatever you do, think for your career goals.   Do not blindly follow instructions from your bosses.  You may end up getting no where eventually!

1. If you do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got! – Yes, this is true.  You will always get whatever you will when you do the same thing over and over again.  If you want something bigger and better or being more successful, you need to break out from your usual cycle!
2. Everyone has his or hers own unique map of the world – To change it, you need to first understand it – This is taken from NLP.  Each of us has our way of thinking and life experience.  To influence someone, we need to know their mental model.  We need to know why certain things are important to them and through that we can address them accordingly when we want to influence them.
3. You already have most of the resources you need to influence people – You are all of the resources.  You need not read all the books on influence and negotiation to get you influential.  What you need to do is practice and practice.  Practice makes perfect.  Sharpening your influencing skill in every session.  You can shape the way you perceive things.  It all starts from you!
4. If someone else can do something, you can learn from the person’s success – You just need to model their skills – Do not reinvent the wheel.  People are success because they have a model that is effective and working already!  Learn from them.  Emulate the best practices from them that work well for you.
5. The meaning of your communication is the response you get – There are no failures, only outcomes – Yes there are no failures, only outcomes.  Whatever response you give, whatever decision you make will only generate outcome.  Therefore, it’s wise to always think of what you desire to achieve and work towards that, instead of blaming on yourself or anybody for being the point of failure.

This is taken from the book, The Influential Fundraisers authored by Bernard Ross and Clare Segal.  This book has content targeted to fundraisers as the title describes.  However, the applicability of the techniques can be used on all aspects of influence and negotiation.  That is even to influence your colleagues and boss to a decision or influence a customer’s sales decision.  Be sure of what your colleagues are basing on in deciding and you will definitely be able to influence them more easily.

You must have heard from motivation speakers about living your dreams.  Thinking is believing (following the doing).  But is that possible in the real world now?  We have tons of baggage to carry along with us in the journey of life.  We have to make money in order so survive.  How can we think ideally and achieve the ideal outcome?

It is possible in some sense if we believed and hold on to this belief!  It goes the same at work as well!  Ideal situation wants the best of both worlds.  NO! Ideal situation wants the BEST OF ALL WORLDS! That is what it means.  This will make us plan and execute to have the ideal outcome.  But what we are doing at work is compromise.  We adopt a give-and-take mentality with whatever situations that are given to us.  We work with our limited resources and optimize the maximum outcome.  We work with our colleagues to achieve results that are partially beneficial between both of us.  It’s not ideal at all!

Now, let’s compare between ideal situations and compromise.  Ideal situations plans for getting an ideal outcome while compromise plans and executes for a compromise outcome between both sides.  We should achieve more than what our normal (compromise) baseline!

From young we were taught to live our dreams.  But when we step into the real world, it is almost impossible to vision what we dreamt of in the young.  We were taught to compromise on resources.  What must go up somewhere will result in something going down somewhere.  When you want to earn more cash by meeting more clients after work, you get less time to spend with your family for dinner.  It is a zero-sum equation. But now, think Ideal situation!  You want to meet more clients after work yet you want to have time to spend with your family for dinner every night!  You work towards that by planning effective schedule, by meeting targeted high ROI clients!  You get your sales and you get more time with your family!

That’s why; thinking (and planning and executing) of achieving ideal situation is such a powerful concept in personal productivity and success!  Now do you compromise your position or negotiation power in order to keep things moving?  At the end of the day, do you get what you desired?  Is it what you want in the end?  Can you feel the potential of this concept if you were to apply it to your daily life and work?

Do not Bow to Challenges!

The first and foremost, do not bow to the difficulties of the challenge.   Think, a challenge would not be called a problem/challenge if there isn’t any difficulty with it.  If we withdraw ourselves from facing a challenge, and admit that we will never overcome the challenge, then we will never be able to achieve any success in our life.

Challenges can be seen like a wall. This wall separates the people that want to achieve success and those that do not want to achieve success.  If you allow yourself to stop in front of the problem/challenge, then most likely you are not those that have the desire to succeed in life.  In fact, you should consistently tell yourself, by taking up challenges, you are actually keen to succeed in your life.  The challenge is merely a door that you have to walk through.  Those that fear walking through it will never be able to find success.

Get Back Your Life Goals

In our modern age, we tend to seek a lifestyle that is far necessary of what a normal human being should.  The pursuit of such life style makes the world we live in more demanding and complex. Behind the pursue, when we achieve the type of lifestyle, we become complacent with what we have.  Our desire to excel slowly fades away in time when we always want to go the easy way out.

Sometimes, we need to look back at where we started off.  There are people who left their high-paying job in exchange for a simple business.  Or even join volunteering groups.  By looking back at ourselves, we find things that are close and true to ourselves.  We find new challenges in us and the motivation to push ourselves to excel.

Transform Risk into Motivation!

When the tough gets going, the rewards are higher.  No pain no gain.  These are unarguable truth.   We frequently get disappointed after a failure.  More than often, we are afraid to bear the consequences of failure.

Everything there is an associated risk.  And we know, risk and rewards come together in a package.  If you choose to take low-risk approach, your rewards will be not as fantastic.  You might as well continue with whatever you feel comfortable with.  However, when you take a high-risk approach, your rewards can be of limitless.  View risks as forces of motivation instead of fearing them.  We are sure that by doing sufficient preparation and homework, you will gain confidence in taking up the challenges!

1. Walk – Yes walk more.  Try not taking your ride out for the week.  Experience walking.  Feel the environment around you that you may have missed out while driving.  Jog too.  Breathe in the fresh air in the park.  Don’t you find it boring to run on the treadmill (like some hamster)?
2. Smile – Always.  To everyone.  Smile silly to yourself sometimes.  This cheers you up and brightens your day.  Smile even if someone makes a mistake.  Smiling is contagious.
3. Drink Water – Yes more plain water.  Plain water is essential for a healthy body.  Your body needs it.  Not soda or the caffeinated beverages.  It’s unhealthy and waste of the money.  You can curb the urge to have these flavoured drinks.
4. Buy Used Items – Be thrifty.  It’s not necessary to get the latest stuff or getting branded goods.  Whatever works will do.  You can save tonnes on it.  Same philosophy, sell your used items.  Keep them in good condition and they can fetch you some money.
5. Under-organize – Sometimes it’s counter-productive to keep things complex.  Sometimes things are work better when they are simple and sweet.  There’s always this saying, “Keep It Simple Stupid!” and it does have its rights in its message.
6. Live Small – Don’t over spend.  Don’t spend beyond your capability.  Don’t get a personal loan.  You will always be indebted to the creditor (unless they collapsed).  Save or use the money for better purpose.  In the long run, you need not worry about your cash flow in the office and you’ll be happier.
7. Be Adaptable – You are always adaptable.  Stay nimble and flexible.  Always remember that you can be adaptable in all situations.   If things don’t go your way at a point of time, change yourself, change your mindset, adapt to the situation.  This will make you more accustomed to changes around you and keep you positive.
8. Don’t JUST follow the Lists of Rules – Don’t confine yourself with rules.  Yes, we do need rules to guide our directions.  But at times, break out of the rules.  Do what is necessary and productive accordingly.  Don’t blindly follow them.

1. Get in tune with things such as reading or listening that motivates you every single day. Don’t allow a single day to pass without injecting external motivation in your daily life.
2. Keep track of your daily progress in a journal and carry it wherever you go.  Record the changes.  Observe if you are abiding to your daily schedule.  It may seem like a chore but the main objective is to monitor your daily progress and if it eventually leads to your life/career goal.
3. Set goals and make changes to the goals accordingly.  Goals will change overtime.  Don’t worry about making goals that right now feel unattainable or baseless. The hardest part of making big goals is starting.  Break goals into smaller achievable ones.  In this way, you won’t feel overwhelmed and you gain a sense of achievement whenever you reach the smaller ones.
4. Keep track of every person you meet.  Record the name and the details of the conversation you had with them.  In this way, you never miss out any new friends and opportunities.  It will come in handy in future as your network grows.
5. Start investments.   Let your money grow for you at the same time where you progress in your career.  However, do let one of them reduce the productivity of the other.
6. Begin looking for opportunities to build passive income (money that you don’t have to work for once you’ve done the initial work).  Note down all the ideas you have for passive income.  The most important thing you can do is be aware of the ideas you already have.   You want to retire early right?
7. Sleep at your optimal level.  Do not waste your time sleeping your life.  Just imagine how much you can achieve with all the time wasted when you are over sleeping. However, do not get yourself burnout by depriving yourself from your necessary rest hours.  It will be counter-productive if you push yourself over the limits.
8. Look for opportunities to serve. Others will be wiling to help you when you are willing to help others too.  You will find more happiness and peace when you help people.  Which at times more valuable than real cash.
9. Stop being a victim. Focus on what YOU can DO, and DO IT. Stop assigning blame and don’t look for excuses. Take responsibility of your decision.  No point going on in a downward spiral of self-blame.  Divert the negative energy towards positive growth!