Check out a few of the great posts from the myGreenlight blog this week:

• How to Make People Care About Who You Are and What You Do - NEA co-author Tahl Raz's take on his interview with coach and author Mark Magnacca.
• The Five Best Quotes for Christmas Cards That Write Themselves
• A Life Without Email - why some companies are implementing a "zero email" policy.
• Relationship Roundup - a focus on leadership traits that will have you better relate to those you lead and hope to lead.

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

Check out a few of the great posts that appeared on the myGreenlight blog this week:

• Legendary Networker - Heidi Roizen: A transcript excerpt's from Tahl Raz's Social Capitalist interview.
• That Was Qwik: myGreenlight's Director of Customer Experience weighs in on the Netflix debacle.
• Should a Cover Letter Ever Have a Smiley Face?
• Relationship Roundup: Some thoughts on how to put the most authentic version of you out in front and a tribute to Steve Jobs.

Enjoy!

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

Check out some of the posts that have been on the myGreenlight blog this week:

• Strategic Selling: You Don't Earn Trust with a Powerpoint from myGreenlight's VP of Sales, Will Petruski.
• A transcript excerpt from Tahl Raz's interview with Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer.
• Social Media Today: Is Your CEO Listening to What You Have to Say? from myGreenlight's Member Coordinator, Ritu Walia.
• Oh Netflix, Why?  Kristen Bassick's, myGreenlight Director of Customer Experience, take on the recent Netflix PR debacle.

0 comments // In Site News and Happenings

Today's post is an RMA Master's Mission. I hope you enjoy it.-KF

In order to get power, people must act as if they have power, whether they feel it or not. Authority is 20 percent given, 80 percent taken. “People often don’t ask for what they want and are afraid of standing out too much because they worry that others may resent or dislike their behavior, seeing them as self-promoting,” writes author Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer. “You need to get over the idea that you need to be liked by everybody and that likeability is important in creating a path to power, and you need to be willing to put yourself forward. If you don’t, who will?”

Pfeffer cites the best-selling author of The Four-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, who has made an art out of being memorable. Ferriss basks in the outrageous, using provocative language to make counter-intuitive claims, always looking for an opportunity to raise his visibility. A new best-selling book, invites to keynote the most prestigious conferences, and an army of blog followers speak to the impressive results.

That's why Pfeffer counsels prospective power brokers to speak up, make demands, and learn to stand out. Write for the company blog or magazine; organize a social or philanthropic event, advocate for some kind of workplace change. Your Mission: get noticed!

What have you done or plan to do to stand out from the crowd?

Mission Adapted from: Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer's Power: Why Some People Have It - And Others Don't

9 comments // In Leadership

See me explain how to get over your fear of approval (or lack thereof) when sharing your goals. Finding a process that helps you look inward instead of outward gives you the confidence you need.

Are you hesitant or gung-ho when it comes to sharing your goals?

20 comments // In Communication

Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to keep tabs on your most important contacts’ interests as they make news across the Web. When an alert comes through that, say, contact A’s company just announced a new CMO, or contact B’s favorite soccer team just won a match, I send them a ping (a quick email or text) with greetings, salutations, and some thoughtful or funny words. Though the content is helpful – and yes, you will need to do your homework in order to know what to track –  the truth is that these pings are really just an opportunity to check in and see how they’re doing, and how I can help.

Many of you may already be doing this, but for anyone who’s been lazy about getting Alerts  up and running, today’s tip is an excerpt from Mitch Meyerson’s Success Secrets of the Social Media Superstars, a collection of insider tips from today’s brightest social media innovators – including an opening chapter from me.

Dave Evans’ contribution, “Social Media in One Hour a Day,” included this great how-to on setting Google Alerts. I hope it’s the foot in the rear that you need to finally get yourself started – or to expand your use of this great tool!

Social Media in One Hour a Day

by Dave Evans

Featured Power Tool: Google Alerts – excerpted from Success Secrets of the Social Media Superstars

To set up Google Alerts:
1) Go to Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) and log in. If you need to create an account--if you don’t already have a Google Gmail ID--then create one now.
2) Type in the names of your brand, product, service or organization, or those of a competitor.
3) If you have a feed reader set up, choose “Feed” as the delivery; otherwise choose “email.” Figure 3 shows you how to do this.

Figure 3: Setting up Google Alerts, Step 1

4) If you chose “Feed” you’ll see a screen like that in Figure 4. If you’re using Google reader, click the link presented. If not, click the feed link and paste the URL into your feed reader.

Figure 4: Setting up Google Alerts, Step 2

That’s it. You’ll start receiving alerts automatically. As noted, if you’re using email delivery think about adding inbox filters to automatically route these alerts.

You can get a copy of Mitch’s book as well as audio and video bonuses at http://www.SocialMediaMarketingSuperstars.com.

What are your savviest tips for staying up-to-date on your network?  Also, need help know what your most important contacts' interests are? Read How to Turn Two Minutes Into a Lifetime Connection.

5 comments // In Relationship Management

When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news.  - Charles Anderson Dana

You must manage your own media. Yes, a PR firm can help you generate those contacts, but early in your career you won’t need them and you probably won’t be able to afford them.

Who better than you to tell your story with credibility and passion? Start making calls to the reporters who cover your industry. Have lunch with them. Create and send press releases. Remember, media folks need you as much as you need them. They may not need your exact story at the exact time you want, but with a little stick-to-itiveness, they’ll come around.

Here are 10 tips to help you break a big story – yours!

1. Know the Media Landscape
Nothing infuriates reporters and editors more, I’m told, than to get a pitch from someone who clearly has no idea what their publication is about or who their audience is.  So spend time reading their articles, figuring out what they cover, and what kinds of stories their publications like to run. Read more →

10 comments // In Career, Personal Branding

Recently I received an advanced copy of The Leap, a thought-provoking and inspiring new book by my friend Rick Smith.  I met Rick through his work with World 50, the uber-influential executive networking company he founded a few years back. 

The Leap is most powerful when it pushes readers to bust through their own personal glass ceilings, to use one of my favorite phrases. To use Rick’s phraseology, we get stuck in a “Now Trap” because our brains are constantly trying to protect us from an uncertain future. So instead of leaping forward toward our dreams, we get mired in psychological warfare between our creative and reactionary aspects.

The key idea here is that the very idea of “potential” is created in our minds.  The limits to that potential are created in the very same place. WE are the biggest thing holding us back from greatness. Not only do I agree with that, I’ve experienced it on a profoundly personal level, part of the story I told in Who’s Got Your Back. 

As the following exclusive excerpt from The Leap illustrates, it is our willingness to tackle head on the forces that hold us in place that allows us to achieve our greatest potential. Rick dispels the myths that hold us back, and challenges us to once again dream big. Enjoy!

Excerpt from The Leap:  How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel your Career from Good to Great, by Rick Smith

At first glance, we humans would seem to be built for innovation and entrepreneurship. We’re the species that dreams big things, the one that imagines a different future for ourselves, and it all begins with our neural architecture.

For 500 million years, the human brain (and the proto-human one that preceded it) did little more than poke along, not changing materially in size or shape. Then, beginning about 2 to 3 million years ago, our gray matter started to explode. Today, in what amounts to a wink in geological time, we have doubled our average brain volume from that benchmark break point.

But volume is the least of it. Cranial studies and other evidence show conclusively that what grew most dramatically in the brain over the last several million years was the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that allows us to visualize the future and anticipate coming events.

Today, we spend on average 12 percent of our time—3 hours each day, or roughly 10 years in an 80-year life span—contemplating what is to come. This is what makes us different from every other living thing: We live in the present but keep a foot in the past and the future.

Put another way, a cheetah or a great white shark or even our close DNA cousin the orangutan has to prove itself every day. We don’t. We store up canned goods and water in case the power goes out; buy homes on time, via mortgages, in anticipation of rising values and future earning power; save money for our kids’ college education so they can have a better a life than us; and invest in IRAs, Keoghs, and 401(k)s to help feather our own old age.

Torn Between Opposites
The planning-dreaming-poet side of the brain, the part that’s ready to leap toward wherever opportunity might wait, is one facet. But there’s another, older, survival-driven part of the brain that works in almost exact opposition.

Encouraged by our huge new frontal lobe, we envision big things to come, but when push comes to shove, our older brain fights like mad to defend the current state of our lives. We court risk in our imagination, then run from it in our daily lives. We are almost compelled to plot out alternative story lines for our lives and careers and families, but we are compelled even more powerfully to avoid what we imagine. That’s the great irony of humankind: we are at once the animal capable of dreaming and the one that holds itself back from achieving its dreams. True, we are wired to think about the future, but in critical ways, we are wired to think about it incorrectly.

Stuck in the present, we fret over how far up the corporate ladder we can climb, whether we will ever make VP of Sales, or what our compensation will be a dozen years out, when we really need to be asking ourselves is what we should be doing with the rest of our lives. If we’re not fulfilled, if we’re not in touch with what we intuit our potential to be, the rest—titles, offices, salary—is all window dressing and empty calories.

The frontal lobe speaks loudly enough in our private daily counsels that we all know this to be true to some extent. We long for the change that will make us fully in touch with out essential selves. We ache for work that will leave us fulfilled and content. But the rest of our brain, conditioned by millions of years of human and prehuman experience, anticipates failure, not success. And because it does, it sends a very different message: The upside of dramatic change isn’t worth the effort and exposure involved.

In effect, we imagine the future not so we can embrace it, but so we can avoid it.

Buying into Your Own Status Quo
In effect, you have created a status quo and bought into it; studies have consistently shown that the bigger the bet and the more you fretted over it, the more certain you are that your reasoning is sound and the outcome you have predicted highly likely. That’s the way the brain works. It makes us sweat and strain over our decisions like a crew of ditchdiggers; then, once the decision is made, the brain invokes a psychological defense clause that says, Well, that sounds like a great bet to me. I’ll stick with it through thick and thin.

So it is with jobs and careers and even life patterns. We often invest so heavily in them, and buy into the logic of our investment and decision making so thoroughly, that we see abandoning them at the one extreme as a kind of psychological suicide and at the other as an unnecessary dare, given that the future (as our flawed brains paint it) is so likely to re-create the present. Rather than face up to the potential of positive, dramatic change, we silence the argument within ourselves, and in doing so, we spare ourselves the pain both of a difficult contemplation and of potentially realizing that our assumptions about the future have been fundamentally flawed.

In various branches of science, this is known as a closed system. In more everyday terms, it’s like walking into a dead-end alley. Maybe we should think of it as the “Now Trap.” What is closes in around us. What could be seems impossibly distant. And the space between them appears far too risky to navigate. No wonder our personal ruts seem so hard to escape—they are, in fact, Now Traps every one.

The Roads Not Taken
These are the pranks the brain plays on us. This is the way it builds the Now Trap that holds us in the ruts of our lives and careers. The brain provides us with a massive frontal lobe to imagine the future, then tricks us into believing that whatever lies out there for us will not be all that different than the present. The brain gifts each of us with enormous potential, then convinces us that the risk of pursuing our potential is greater than the reward of achieving it. It allows us to envision what we might become, then tells us we lack the talent and skills to get there.

We can’t help longing after the choices not made, the roads not taken, more than the choices we do make and the roads we do take. That again is part of what being a human being is all about. We’re the decision-making, decision-regretting animal; we have the capacity to rue as well as to anticipate and to envision alternative futures for ourselves. But unlike the poet Robert Frost, we can’t quite bring ourselves to take those roads less traveled, the ones that make, in Frost’s words, “all the difference.”

Our psychological immune system is poised to jump. It wants us to make the Leap. It can deal far more easily with too much courage than with too much cowardice. It’s more comfortable with our stumbling forward than with our hedging our bets. But the brain won’t let us do that without a fight that most of us are not prepared to make.

Thus we wage psychological warfare on ourselves. But—and this is the critical point—we don’t have to. The Now Trap is formidable, but it’s not Houdini proof. We simply have to start looking at life through a different lens. The fact is, the woods are full of ordinary people, everyday Joes and Janes, who have broken free from the Now Trap and transformed rut-stuck careers into deeply fulfilling callings—work that not only has brought them great personal satisfaction but has also had a great and lasting impact on others.

Above all else, remember this: whatever traps we may feel stuck in are largely of our own making. What we have built we can also undo. What we can dream we can achieve.

Question: What fears are stopping you from achieving your full potential -- and to what degree can our relationships help us escape the Now Trap?

6 comments // In Coaching

The thought of being obligated to another hundred or so people—sending birthday cards, dinner invites, and all that stuff that we do for those close to us—seems outlandishly taxing.

Only, for some, it’s not. These people are super-connectors. People like me who maintain contact with thousands of people. The key, however, is not only that we know thousands of people but that we know thousands of people in many different worlds, and we know them well enough to give them a call.

So here’s the good news for those of you who aren’t so aggressively social: Once you become friendly with a super-connector, you’re only two degrees away from the thousands of different people we know.

Connectors can be found in every imaginable profession, but I’m going to focus on seven professions where they most commonly congregate. Each of these kinds of connectors provides me with a link to an entire world of people, ideas, and information that, in a very significant way, has made my own life a little more fun, helped my career along, or made the businesses I worked for more successful.

1. Restaurateurs
Being a true-blue connector is a requisite for most people who own restaurants. The success of their enterprise depends on a core group of regulars who see the restaurant as a home away from home. And it’s quite easy to get to know a restaurateur: Become a regular.

2. Headhunters
Recruiters. Job-placement counselors. Search executives. They are like gatekeepers. Instead of answering to one executive, however, the really successful ones may answer to hundreds of executives in the field in which they recruit. Headhunters are professional matchmakers, earning their wage by introducing job candidates to companies that are hiring.

Can anyone contact a headhunter? To be honest, headhunters prefer to be the one contacting you. But if you’re careful about not trying to sell yourself and instead offering them access to your network, they’ll be receptive

3. Lobbyists
Well informed, persuasive, and self-confident, lobbyists are generally impressive networkers. By virtue of their job, they are intimately familiar with the ways of large organizations and how local and national government work. They are almost uniformly passionate people whose goal is to sway politicians to vote on legislation in a way that favors the interest they represent.

How do they work? Lobbyists will often host cocktail parties and dinner get-togethers, allowing them to interact with politicians—and their opponents—in a casual atmosphere. Their more grassroots efforts involve long hours spent on the phone and in writing letters, trying to rouse the community to get involved behind an issue. All of which makes them a rather easy group to please. Can you hold an event for them? Volunteer your services? Refer other volunteers to their cause? Introduce them to potential clients?

4. Fundraisers
“Follow the money” are words fundraisers live by. They know where it is, what it will take to get it, and most important, who’s most likely to give it away. As a result, fundraisers, whether they work for a political organization, university, or nonprofit group, tend to know absolutely everybody.

5. Public relations people
PR people spend their whole day calling, cajoling, pressuring, and begging journalists to cover their clients. The relationship between media and PR is an uneasy one, but at the end of the day, necessity brings them together like long-lost cousins. A good friend who works in PR can be your entrée into the world of media and, sometimes, celebrity.

6. Politicians
Politicians at every level are inveterate networkers. They have to be. They shake hands, kiss babies, give speeches, and go to dinners, all in the name of gaining the trust of enough people to get elected. The stature of politicians is derived from their political power rather than their wealth. Anything you can do to help them gain power with voters, or exercise power in office, will go a long way to ensuring you a place in their inner circle.

7. Journalists
Journalists are powerful (the right exposure can make a company or turn a nobody into a somebody), needy (they’re always looking for a story), and relatively unknown (few have achieved enough celebrity to make them inaccessible).

These are seven different professions tailor-made for superconnectors. Reach out to some. And there are others—lawyers, brokers, etc. Become a part of their network and have them become a part of yours. Seek out ideas from people you don’t ordinarily talk to who inhabit professional worlds you don’t ordinarily travel in.

In one word: Connect. In four better words: Connect with the connectors.

20 comments // In Business Networking