Neil Wadhwa | FreshGigs.ca - Part 4

Author Archives: Neil Wadhwa

“I Don’t Have Time” Is a Terrible Excuse

"I Dont Have Time" Is a Terrible Excuse - FreshGigs

We’re four weeks into 2015—how are your resolutions holding up?

The running joke when people create resolutions is wondering out-loud how soon in the year the resolutions will be broken. Beyond New Year, people make decisions everyday about chasing goals or improving lifestyles, but even the smallest of ideas tends to fizzle out upon first sight of a potential roadblock.

Reaching your goals doesn’t happen unless you’re willing to make sacrifices

One of the biggest reasons people don’t see their ideas and goals come to fruition is due to the perceived roadblock of not having enough time. The fact is, “I don’t have time” is a simply a lazy excuse. People now have unprecedented access to tools that suit all budgets and that can be used nearly anywhere— everything you need is at your disposal. Here are a few things to consider if you’ve ever hidden behind the “time” excuse:

Maybe You Really Don’t Have the Time

Here’s the thing: there are 168 hours in the week. The time is there; it’s just a matter of what you do with it.

Becoming a better writer doesn’t mean writing a novel in a week—it means baby steps and gradually hitting milestones. All you need is 10 minutes a day, and you can find the opportunities everywhere: wake up 10 minutes earlier in the morning or go to sleep 10 minutes later at night, practice writing during your lunch break, practice writing on the train during your commute home. The same approach applies to nearly anything you want to achieve—you just need to undercover these small opportunities for free time throughout the day and take advantage of them.

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10 Social Media Stats You Need to Know for 2015 [Infographic]

FreshGigs Infographic

2015 is well underway—how’s your social media strategy doing so far? The case for social media no longer has to be made: everyone understands the value that social media adds to marketing and to the overall growth of an organization. But social media use is constantly changing and constantly evolving—one blink and you’re behind.

We’ve put together a quick infographic to help you cut through the clutter. Here are 10 social media stats that you need to know for 2015 (click on the infographic to expand!):

FreshGigs Infographic: Social Media Stats You Need to Know

The Weekly Recap: Hand-Picked Articles for the Week of February 22–28

FreshGigs Weekly Summary

Welcome to The FreshGigs Weekly Recap. We know how busy you are, so every week we’ll help you get caught up on some of the best career related stories from around the web. Weekend reading from last week that you can apply for the week ahead.

4 Signs You Talk Too Much at the Office (Entrepreneur)

There’s an office blabbermouth in every company. You know the person—the one that makes you stop in your tracks and turn right around if you hear his or her voice overflowing nearby. These office loudmouths may not realize that they talk too much, and unfortunately, talking too much can be a cause for career derailment. But… what if you are the office chatterbox?! [Que Suspense Music] Kim Lachance Shandrow provides four ways to find out if you’re the one in the office that people avoid having a conversation with—and what you can do to fix this. Read the article here.

Too many writers try their hardest to tell people what creativity isn’t, which only hurts the readers’ expectations of themselves.

Article Snippet: “If everyone everywhere you look has earbuds stuffed into their ears, or if they quickly jam them into their ears upon your approach, sorry, bud, they’re trying to avoid you. Hey, it could be worse. They could ruthlessly red light you.”

3 Ways to Make Sure Your Resume Bullet Points Will Impress Recruiters (The Muse)

There’s a lot of advice online about resume do’s and don’ts—and we certainly add to the conversation here at FreshGigs. But it’s all for good reason, as your resume is the tool that gets your foot in your door, and ultimately helps you land a job. One of the biggest problems people struggle with in regards to creating or updating a resume is what to include as “key points” under each job title. If you’ve worked at a company for 2 years, for example, how can you condense all that down to 3 or 4 bullet points? Lily Zhang provides some insight on how to strengthen your bullet points—and what recruiters look for in a resume—in her latest article for The Muse. Read the article here.

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The Weekly Recap: Hand-Picked Articles for the Week of February 15–21

FreshGigs Weekly Recap

Welcome to The FreshGigs Weekly Recap. We know how busy you are, so every week we’ll help you get caught up on some of the best career related stories from around the web. Weekend reading from last week that you can apply for the week ahead.

Should I Tell The Interviewer About My Upcoming Vacation? (Forbes)

Job hunting with a scheduled vacation approaching puts you in tricky situation. Do you let the interviewer know about your vacation plans during the interview? What about dropping an interviewer a note after the interview? What if the vacation—even if it’s for an important family wedding—gets in the way of receiving a job offer? There’s a lot to think about, and it’s common situation that people go through—you booked the vacation a year in advance, but by the time it comes around you’re actively interviewing for a new position. In this article, Liz Ryan, who we’ve covered on the FreshGigs blog before, shares some insight on what you should tell the interviewer in regards to your upcoming vacation. Read the article here.

Email is supposed to bring people together and make communication easier, but sometimes it does just the opposite.

Article Snippet: “You and I are old enough to know that when they don’t value you during the recruiting process, ain’t no way it’s getting better once you’re on the payroll. You know what they say about first impressions, Rick! You are making a first impression now with each of those prospective employers. If they leave you sitting in silence, speak up.”

Why Your Company Should Consider Banning Email (FastCompany)

A radical thought: should your company do away with email? It’s hard to imagine going a day without using email, but that’s exactly the policy PBD Worldwide has implemented—no work email on Fridays. Email is supposed to bring people together and make communication easier, but sometimes it does just the opposite [Tweet This]. Even worse, work email can be a source of stress, especially when you’re trying to relax on the weekend and keep getting work email alerts on your phone. In this article, Stephanie Vozza looks at whether banning email is a worthwhile idea. Read the article here.

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Walk the Third Path When Leaving a Company

Walk The Third Path - FreshGigs

Everyone has that one job that they consider to be a “mistake” for taking. It happens to the best of us [Tweet This]. The company looked great and you were excited to work there long-term, but after working there for a few months you realized that it just wasn’t the right fit.

What makes the situation worse is the awkward position you’re put in. Should you keep working there while looking for another job? Should you leave right away? Should you wait another 6 months to see if the job improves? In these cases, the questions and answers rest squarely on your shoulders. But what if the relationship between you and the company is only soured as a result of disagreements with your managers or their management style? It’s in these cases when the fate of your future isn’t entirely in your hands, and it’s up to you to work with the very people you’re having problems with, your managers, to determine the best course of action.

When you’re in this situation and faced with these two paths—quitting or getting fired—you need to turn to what Liz calls the Third Path.

Liz Ryan, author of Should I Quit, or Wait to Get Fired?, saw this situation arise far too often during her time as CEO of Human Workplace. The core concern is you, the employee, need income. If you quit to escape the hostile environment without a job already lined up, you lose the opportunity to collect unemployment insurance. If your relationship with management has reached the point where you expect to eventually get fired down the line, you can then collect unemployment insurance when you’re let go—but that means you also have to stick around for an undetermined period of time and work in an environment you don’t want to be in.

When you’re in this situation and faced with these two paths—quitting or getting fired—you need to turn to what Liz calls the Third Path.

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The Weekly Recap: Hand-Picked Articles for the Week of February 8–14

The Weekly Recap - FreshGigs

Welcome to FreshGigs’ first weekly recap. We know how busy you are, so every week we’ll help you get caught up on some of the best career related stories from around the web. Weekend reading from last week that you can apply for the week ahead.

3 Ways You Could Be Annoying Networking Contacts (LearnVest)

We’ve heard the saying: it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know. Well…what if you’re annoying the people you know? [Tweet This] Networking is tricky at times—you want to put yourself out there, but you don’t want to be overly aggressive, or overstep your boundaries. Lily Herman for the Muse, cross-posted on LetterVest, discusses three things you might be doing to annoy your networking contacts, and how communication with your contacts can be improved. Read the full article here.

No matter what you read, what you learn, or whom you talk to, the majority of the time you’ll be operating on your own gut instinct.

Article Snippet: “Just because you had a nice email exchange with someone once doesn’t mean that you two are best friends and you can ask that person for favors all willy-nilly. Asking your contacts for too much, too quickly can make them feel like it’s a fake relationship, like you’re just using them for professional advancement. And who wants to help a person like that?”

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4 Ways Positive Behaviours Impact Your Career

FreshGigs - 4 Ways Positive Behaviours Impact Your Career

“The power of positivity” is more than a catchy phrase. A negative state of mind wears away at your confidence, preventing you from reaching your full potential or from realizing the personal and professional opportunities at hand. Positivity, on the other hand, tends to blaze the path towards career reward, success, and satisfaction [Tweet This].

Kathy Caprino, a trained marriage and family therapist, career coach, and author of 10 Ways Being More Positive Improves Your Career, has seen the effects of negative behaviours and language first hand. Through her decade of working with people with career struggles, she’s seen that those who are constantly more negative than positive suffer from unhappiness in their day-to-day life, and an eventual collapse of their career potential.

Everyone runs into bumps in the road. You’re more likely to let these road bumps derail you if you have a negative mindset, focusing on what went wrong and then falling into a slump.

If you feel that you have a negative mindset and want to start thinking more positively, you can begin your transformation by being more aware of how you operate in the world, specifically in regards to your interactions and communications in the office. Make sure you have at least five positive actions/thoughts to every one negative thought for everything you do. Keeping a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative actions will starting making you a more positive person overall—and the closer you get to a 1:1 ratio, the more negative you’ll be.

Still need some convincing to the power of positivity? Here are four benefits that positivity has on your personal and professional life:

1. Positivity Helps You Bounce Back Quicker

Everyone runs into bumps in the road. You’re more likely to let these road bumps derail you if you have a negative mindset, focusing on what went wrong and then falling into a slump [Tweet This].

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4 Ways to Start Thinking More Laterally

FreshGigs - 4 Ways to Start Thinking More Laterally

Marketers love buzzwords. We often hear about “thinking outside of the box,” along with many of the other words and sentences that have become overused in business or personal messaging. But what gets lost among the calls for approaching problems with “creativity,” is simply approaching problems with lateral thinking. (Tweet This Quote)

As explained by Shane Snow, in his article How to Apply Lateral Thinking to Your Creative Work, lateral thinking outlines that when you disregard the need to act on a problem immediately, and reframe the questions/problems being posed, that the best answer/solution becomes obvious.

When faced with a problem or question, don’t try and find a solution as fast as possible just because it’s how you always do things.

The problem is, the default for most people is linear thinking, and trying to attack a problem head-on without taking a step back—but it is possible to change your default thinking from linear to lateral. Here are four ways to starting thinking laterally with any problem that comes your way:

  1. Change Your Perspective

To spark lateral thinking, pretend you’re someone else trying to solve the problem—how would someone with no prior experience or knowledge try to find a solution? Innovation often occurs when new people enter an industry, or varying groups of people meet and create solutions based off of their collective experiences. Start fresh, and ignore all prior conventions or notions.

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How an Addiction to Praise can Derail Your Career

Praise-can-Derail-Your-Career

What’s your motivation for being productive at work? CEOs and management are probably asking themselves the same thing about their entire workforce, and are settling on work perks and praise as the way to drive employee success.

The idea of using praise as recognition for a job well done isn’t a new concept. As far back as grade one you might have received a gold star sticker for doing a good job on your homework—a gold star that not every student received.

“It isn’t just about the money,” says J.T. “When you have to spend 8+ hours/day at the job, you care about how happy the environment will make you. Savvy employers with great Employment Brands know that.”

But as J.T. O’Donnell outlines in her article, Addicted To Praise? How It May Affect Your Career, there’s a danger in the love of being praised: it can be addicting. Worse, your addiction to praise could disrupt your career. People have been conditioned to act a certain way in order seek incentives (this is known as “extrinsic motivation”). It’s possible to become engrossed in seeking extrinsic motivation to the point where you’ll always need the promise of an incentive to get work done, and you won’t be motivated to do anything for the simple satisfaction of accomplishment (known as “intrinsic motivation”).

Intrinsic motivation is important because managers tend to promote employees who go above-and-beyond their roles and responsibilities. If you want to climb the corporate ladder, you need to be self-motivated enough to create value even when it’s not asked of you (when there’s no extrinsic motivation). If you’re only ever willing to do work when there’s the promise of a reward at the end, you’ll only ever do what’s asked of you, and nothing more. And since employers consider cash (your salary) incentive enough, the carrot dangling at the end of the stick won’t always be there for you.

What To Do If You’re Addicted to Praise

Learn to be intrinsically motivated. Even if you work for a company that does constantly praise you, learning how to be happy without the promise of a reward will benefit you, personally and professionally, in the long run. Continue reading →

3 Ways To Increase the Likelihood of a Promotion

Increase-Chances-For-Promotion

Why do some people get promoted, while other, seemingly more “deserving,” people get left behind? The answer lies in the way people (incorrectly) perceive promotions to be granted—that if you work hard, you’ll surely make your way up the corporate ladder. While there is an element of truth to this, you need to do more to ensure you get promotions.

There’s a simple step you can take to communicate your successes without appearing arrogant: send a simple email to your manager, every week.

Janet Choi, author of Why Some People Get Promoted (And Others Don’t), explains that success isn’t a straight line. If you want the promotion you deserve, you can’t sit back and wait for it to happen solely based on the fact that you do great work. Janet notes that the key to increasing your odds of a promotion is to communicate your successes with others. It’s simple: you do things, you tell people.

Here are three ways to tell colleagues about your accomplishments to help get that promotion you deserve:

1. Send a Quick Email

Most people have reservations about communicating their accomplishments to others. When done incorrectly, it comes off as arrogant and annoying, and can even alienate your colleagues. The problem is, you need to tell people about all the work you’re doing, and all the projects you’re completing, otherwise it might go unnoticed. You manager isn’t a mind-reader, and it’s especially problematic if you tend to work in teams, as your manager won’t be able to distinguish between everyone’s individual contributions.

There’s a simple step you can take to communicate your successes without appearing arrogant: send a simple email to your manager, every week.

By sending a simple, informal, description of all you’ve done that week, your manager will be able to see your progress—something that gets lost when looking at successes on a day-to-day basis—and won’t be kept in the dark in regards to all you’re doing, or wondering if you’re even doing your job. Sending a simple email turns an act of self-promotion into a friendly and ordinary update. It keeps you top-of-mind with your manager, and gives your manager a laundry-list of your weekly accomplishments he or she can turn to when determining who in the company should be promoted.

You can adjust the timeframe as needed, sending an email every two weeks or just once a month, incase you feel that once a week is too frequent. Continue reading →