Have you already read the Shriver report?

Here is a quick look:

"Now for the first time in our nation’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. This is a dramatic shift from just a generation ago (in 1967 women made up only one-third of all workers)."

The report is made up of a number of different essays looking at this from their perspectives. For example, women make up half of the talent that is that is available to corporate America. Brad Harrington and Jamie Ladge argue that "..women’s outstanding performance in educational institutions, especially in higher educational and professional schools, demands that employers create workplaces that attract, retain, develop, and exploit (in the best sense of the word) this tremendous resource. They detail, however, that the vast majority of employers need to let go of outdated models such as thinking that there is only one place that work gets done, one way to structure a workday, one model for the ideal career, and one leadership style that works in today’s workplace."

One of the findings is that Americans overwhelmingly want a better balance between life and work. "For starters, both men and women desperately want changes to their work structures. Presented with a list of possible things that would need to change in order to improve work and family life, 54 percent of women and 49 percent of men say that more flexible work hours and schedules would be their top choice. "

Read all about it here: The Shriver report.

Women a BIG force in Business

According to a study by the non profit center for Women Business Research and supported by, among others, Wal-Mart, the economic impact of women owned businesses is tremendous.

These businesses employ, are you sitting down, 23 million people- which is nearly double the number of the biggest 50 companies in the country combined, and is about 16% of the national workforce!!

And not only that: we generate over $3 trillion in revenue. This is where women are and where they go: they start and maintain businesses. They provide employment for others and they create revenue. These businesses ran the gamut of small operations to large multi million dollar affairs.

In fact if they were their own county, women-owned businesses would have the 5th largest world GDP.

Look around you: who do YOU know that runs a business? Pass on these statistics and BE proud of the economic and personal impact women owned businesses have on the United States.

link: http://www.wipp.org/news/30977/Walmart-Partners-Release-Unprecedented-Women-Economic-Impact-Study.htm#

Improve effectiveness and do NOT multi-task!

Research just published in the Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences of the USA suggests that ".. heavy ..multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/21/0903620106.abstract

So in short the study found that multitaskers were actually quite ineffective at managing information, maintaining attention, and getting results. Staying focused on some tasks and especially on the outcomes of the few tasks you are involved in, helps you to filter out non essential information and not lose precious energy by switching from one to another task constantly.

Women bump up against their own glass ceiling

Almost inevitably during our Women leadership workshops, the question of gender perception comes up and many illustrations are shared.
A new study just came out that gives another perspective on the gender leadership issues. Scott Taylor, assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, School of Management, asked 251 male and female managers from different industries nationwide to rate themselves and requested ratings from supervisors, peers and subordinates. Each subject also was asked to predict the ratings made by others.
The men slightly overestimated the ratings by their boss, and women underestimated the ratings by almost 11 %. Taylor suggested that male managers may need to learn other ways of communicating to women employees how valued they are. The learning for the women themselves is, to be more focused on all their good characteristics and less focused on shortcomings.
Let us at least not underestimate ourselves!!
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/aug/11/sp-gender-gap/news-money/

Discover Your Inner Strength: just published

CAN tm: Coach Approach Now= using coaching skills to build resilience! what really is resilience? Well one of the ways of describing it is the following:

To better help understand the enormous value that coaching can have to improve resilience, let me use a definition of resilience, one used for physical materials that will help illustrate my contention. In this context, Wikipedia defines resilience as the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered[1]. As an executive coach I love that definition, because it suggests an insertion (or investment) of energy that can be recovered after a change occurs. This is exactly what many of my clients are looking for: an investment in themselves that will provide them with the energy to deal with change in the future. In other words, the gains obtained through coaching provide them with the ability to recover from or adjust easily to change.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilience

You can read all about coaching and resilience and a LOT more in the new book Discover Your Inner Strength by Coppes,Covey, Blanchard,Tracy.

check it out: www.aeoluscoaching.com (lower left hand corner of home page)

Channel Your energy

Energy. It is like electricity and its outlets/lamps. You can have electricity everywhere,however it may dilute the focus of what you actually want illuminated if there is lights everywhere. How much more effective if there are a couple of floodlights illuminating those items that you want to particularly highlight. Think about the effect of a light on a picture or painting.
Same with your energy.

Where does your energy go? Is is all over the place, diffused? Scattered? And where are you losing most of your energy? Look at your hours, day, even your week critically and see where it "leaks" energy. Plug the holes. make sure your energy is channeled where you want it to go, so it highlights those things/actions that you want highlighted.

What is it that really warrants your energy? What do you want to illuminate with your energy floodlight? Where is the clarity most needed?

what is the MATH of life?

Just finished reading The three mistakes of my life by Chetan Bhagat, an author from India. (one night @the call center) Great book to read.
The sentences that I highlighted are : "Figuring out the math of Life is important.
Well what is that? Who you are, what do you want versus what people expect from you. And how to keep what you want without pissing off people too much. Life is an optimisation problem with tons of variables and constraints."

So if you would look at your life as a math problem, where is your optimisation and where are the variables and constraints and how do they play into your decisions?
What steps would YOU take the optimise your life? Have you ever thought about sitting down and creating your ideal life. That is optimisation! That really addresses who you are and what you want. Consider it and take time this weekend to think about even one aspect of your IDEAL life.

Take that step into action!

Do you also find yourself dallying a bit just before you go on a trip, kind of hanging around, checking everything one more time, maybe reluctant to actually step out of the house and into the cab or the car and go off into the unknown. Or when you have to jump across a stream, really thinking about that last step that will propel you into the jump. Or step into that airplane, are you actually going on the flight now?
There always is this split second moment in which you realize that you actually have to commit, that there is no going back. This is it. You are making the final and irrevocable commitment to the action.

Once done though, it releases energy and there is motion and action forward. So step through the inaction, through the confusion, through the hesitation and move yourself into action.

What is one thing can you do today , right now, that moves you into action. That moves you away from that hesitant phase? What will it help you achieve today?

On-By

ON-BY.

That is a command used by mushers given to their Huskies sled dogs. I recently read this in a nice relaxing book called The Letters by Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger whose family actually runs a sled-dog team. So there is a fair bit of the language and culture embedded in the story. It really touched a chord in me when I read the command On-By and understood it is used to make sure the dogs ignore whatever it is that is on the side of the road and continue to be focused on their goal. Not to be distracted by what happens on the side.

Isn't this maybe what we could do a little more of. Be focused on where we really want to go, what our ultimate end goal is , even only for the day. However if we do want to reach it, we need to be focused on where we are going and not allow ourselves to be distracted from it.

so On-By today to whatever is going to distract us from our goal. On-By this week, this month and maybe even longer than that to whatever is leading us away from our destination. Remain focused on your goals and you will reach your destiny!

ecoNOmy

So today was the day I was thinking about, (and reading a Washington Post full of info on Obama's speech and those of 210 other people) the fact that this current economic crisis can maybe be used to consider another perspective.
What if we throw it upside down and try to figure out "what's great about it?" Maybe what's great about it is that it will give us the opportunity to say NO to certain things in our lives that have been sucking our energy, maybe jobs where we really did not want to be. This could be a catharsis for us, allowing us to ask: where do you want to work? What do you really want to do? Now that you may have to re-focus what WILL you focus on?
You may have to say NO to extra things in your life. Time to evaluate. How necessary were those for you? did they really add to your life?

So think about the ecoNOmy in a different way!