The “Be Passionate” influence tool has one short and simple message: whatever you do, throw yourself into it and do it with enthusiasm and energy (read more about Student to CEO Influence Tools here).
Doing anything with passion will increase your levels of success, because you will care more about it, spend more time on it and will have the drive to make it happen.
You will know if you are passionate about something because being passionate is an emotional thing: you will feel emotionally connected, will be interested, excited and enthused. When you get up in the morning you will want to get working on it; you will want to talk about it and will be proud of it.
Finding and living your passion is also satisfying and fulfilling. What would you rather be working on: something that you find a boring chore or something that you are passionate about and love to do?
Wednesday 30 November 2011
Friday 25 November 2011
"Be Willing To Do It" Influence Tools
The “Be Willing To Do It” influence tools are all about taking massive action towards your outcomes, building on the “Know What You Want” influence tools to maintain energy and drive, overcoming any challenges that come your way and doing things that others don’t do, to become the “top 1%” of achievers and void the pitfalls of “the 99%” (read more about Student to CEO Influence Tools here).
The areas these influence tools cover are similar to the “Know What You Want” influence tools, but are even more action-oriented and include some very specific pieces of advice in relation to how to deal with situations and how to act. The key themes covered include:
The areas these influence tools cover are similar to the “Know What You Want” influence tools, but are even more action-oriented and include some very specific pieces of advice in relation to how to deal with situations and how to act. The key themes covered include:
- How to deal with criticism, overcome challenges and stay committed
- How to set expectations, hold yourself accountable and drive action
- How to do more than anyone else and stand out from the crowd
- How to continuously grow, learn and develop
- How to develop an attitude that is empowering and successful whilst turning negatives to your advantage
Tuesday 22 November 2011
"Know What You Want" Influence Tools
The “Know What You Want” influence tools are all about being highly focused on achieving your outcomes (read more about Student to CEO Influence Tools here).
These influence tools only work if you already have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and the more specific you are in the definition of your goals, the more effective these tools will be.
The key themes covered by these success tools include:
- Focus: if you are focused, both in terms of being very clear about the outcomes you are striving for and in carefully using your time to ensure everything you do takes you closer to those specific outcomes rather than spending time on things that do not, you will be massively more successful than if you spread your efforts over too wide and area that may or may not align to where you want to get to;
- Delivery of value: whatever you do, always aim to deliver value in excess of what you are being paid and track your results and successes, because it is the tangible results that you deliver that people benefit from and care about, not the qualifications you have obtained or the tasks you have carried out. If you have done a lot of work but you cannot say what benefit that work has delivered, what was the value of you doing the work in the first place?
- Continuous learning: no matter where you are in your career, it is critical that you continuously build your understanding and experience in line with the outcomes that you are striving to achieve. Look for opportunities to learn from everything you do – from the day-to-day activities you perform to specific training courses and books;
- Perseverance: you will encounter challenges, you will make mistakes and you will fail. The important thing is how you deal with this failure: if you pick yourself up, learn from it and carry on, you will be a success. The more challenges you overcome, the stronger and more successful you will be – even if in the short term it doesn’t feel like it. Often the most successful people overcame the biggest challenges before they made it to where they are today.
Monday 21 November 2011
“Know Your Map” Influence Tools
The “Know Your Map” influence tools are all about ensuring that you know where you are going and how to get there (read more about Student to CEO Influence Tools here).
The analogy of a “map” is a fairly classic one that most people will be familiar with, but the great thing about this analogy, as reflected by the corresponding influence tools, is that it raises a few important points:
The analogy of a “map” is a fairly classic one that most people will be familiar with, but the great thing about this analogy, as reflected by the corresponding influence tools, is that it raises a few important points:
- Make sure it’s the right map: if you are in London, a map of Paris won’t help you much. In the same way, the “map” that you use for your own personal development needs to be your own, not somebody else’s, because you need to make sure you can find your own way based on where you are and where you want to go;
- Make sure you know where you want to get to: if you don’t know where you are going, you will not be able to work out how you are going to get there. Not only that, but you will not know if you are in the wrong place and you will not have a way of knowing for sure that you have reached the destination that you wanted to reach;
- Make sure you know where you are now: if you don’t know where you are now, it will be very difficult to work out how to get to where you want to get to, because you won’t know how far you have got to go and what obstacles you need to overcome to get there;
- Make sure it’s a good map: maps can vary in quality, in terms of how clear they are, the level of detail they provide and their accuracy. Taking the time to create a good map will save a lot of time in the long run;
- Make sure you take the optimum route: once you know where you want to get to and where you are in relation to that location, there are many possible journeys that you could take to get there. Taking a look at others who have been successful in taking a similar path could help a lot in ensuring your own success. Likewise, steering clear of pitfalls that others have fallen into will save you time and help avoid failure.
Friday 18 November 2011
Using the "Influence Tools" from Student to CEO: 97 Ways To Influence Your Way To The Top In Banking & Finance
I recently purchased "Student to CEO: 97 Ways To Influence Your Way To The Top In Banking & Finance".
I've provided my views on the book below (the summary: it's pretty average but definitely good enough to be worth a glance through - the best bits are the "bite-sized" "influence tool" boxouts and there are some useful financial services-specific examples throughout).
But that's not the purpose of this blog post.
Using Influence Tools
The purpose of this blog post, and the reason I'm highlighting the book here is that it provides 99 (yes, more than the advertised 97) "influence tools" as box-outs throughout the book, which I have decided to use as prompts to write about.
I don't entirely agree with every single prompt, I'm not convinced that the order in which they appear is at all times the most logical, and I might skip some of them because they are too specifically focused on the contents of the book so don't make much sense out of context, but most of them are great common sense and they do provide nice, concise points to write about.
As you can tell from my comments above, I'm not overflowing with praise for the book, but the very fact that it got me writing this is a positive thing and there are a few points that he makes that provide a slightly different perspective on things. Please read the below for more info, and if you are interested in buying a copy, you can get it on Amazon.co.UK here, and Amazon.COM here.
About the book
Whilst this book tries to put a clear emphasis on "banking and finance", it turns out that it's actually a pretty standard self-help book, which takes the usual approach of using the author's experiences as a story to knit together a string of personal development advice.
Its key differentiator is the "Banking and Finance" focus, and this is the main reason that I bought it, because it is an industry that is fairly new to me but that I am currently working in and I have recently accepted a senior role for a global bank, which I will be starting in the New Year.
The anecdotes and stories based on the author's experience are all Banking and Finance related (as you would expect), and the famous people, example scenarios and case studies that he presents are also Banking and Finance related. However, the majority of the advice is pretty generic. That's not a bad thing at all, as it is all pretty sound advice - but the author seems to have tried to compensate for this by writing the phrase "Banking and Finance" every other sentence. Yes, we know this is a book about Banking and Finance but telling us that Banking and Finance is what it's about because it's a Banking and Finance book can become a bit irritating because in a Banking and Finance book you already know it's about Banking and Finance because it says Banking and Finance on the cover and you've already said that your'e writing it for people who want to get ahead in Banking and Finance over 20 times in the intro. You get the idea here...
The other slightly odd thing about this book is that although it has 97 (well actually 99) "influence tool" prompts, the main text of the books doesn't directly reference them. Or at least, it doesn't reference them consistently. They are generally relevant to whatever has been written on the pages that they are included on, but they just seem to be dropped in there. This means that many of them aren't even really explained. In most self-help books that use this kind of concept, the "tips" are either used as headings then explained with supporting anecdotes and exercises, or are clearly and directly relevant to the section that they are included in. If this had been the case in this book, it could have significantly improved the flow of the writing and would have provided more specific take-away points.
Of course, this book is also a marketing tool to get you to go to the author's presentations and buy his services. Unfortunately this also comes across quite clearly at times.
However, despite these points, it's not all bad. There is some real content here and the points made are largely common sense and useful. From the wide range of self-help books that are out there, this wouldn't be the first one that I'd recommend, but if someone asked me whether it was worth a read, I would still say yes.
I've provided my views on the book below (the summary: it's pretty average but definitely good enough to be worth a glance through - the best bits are the "bite-sized" "influence tool" boxouts and there are some useful financial services-specific examples throughout).
But that's not the purpose of this blog post.
Using Influence Tools
The purpose of this blog post, and the reason I'm highlighting the book here is that it provides 99 (yes, more than the advertised 97) "influence tools" as box-outs throughout the book, which I have decided to use as prompts to write about.
I don't entirely agree with every single prompt, I'm not convinced that the order in which they appear is at all times the most logical, and I might skip some of them because they are too specifically focused on the contents of the book so don't make much sense out of context, but most of them are great common sense and they do provide nice, concise points to write about.
As you can tell from my comments above, I'm not overflowing with praise for the book, but the very fact that it got me writing this is a positive thing and there are a few points that he makes that provide a slightly different perspective on things. Please read the below for more info, and if you are interested in buying a copy, you can get it on Amazon.co.UK here, and Amazon.COM here.
About the book
Whilst this book tries to put a clear emphasis on "banking and finance", it turns out that it's actually a pretty standard self-help book, which takes the usual approach of using the author's experiences as a story to knit together a string of personal development advice.
Its key differentiator is the "Banking and Finance" focus, and this is the main reason that I bought it, because it is an industry that is fairly new to me but that I am currently working in and I have recently accepted a senior role for a global bank, which I will be starting in the New Year.
The anecdotes and stories based on the author's experience are all Banking and Finance related (as you would expect), and the famous people, example scenarios and case studies that he presents are also Banking and Finance related. However, the majority of the advice is pretty generic. That's not a bad thing at all, as it is all pretty sound advice - but the author seems to have tried to compensate for this by writing the phrase "Banking and Finance" every other sentence. Yes, we know this is a book about Banking and Finance but telling us that Banking and Finance is what it's about because it's a Banking and Finance book can become a bit irritating because in a Banking and Finance book you already know it's about Banking and Finance because it says Banking and Finance on the cover and you've already said that your'e writing it for people who want to get ahead in Banking and Finance over 20 times in the intro. You get the idea here...
The other slightly odd thing about this book is that although it has 97 (well actually 99) "influence tool" prompts, the main text of the books doesn't directly reference them. Or at least, it doesn't reference them consistently. They are generally relevant to whatever has been written on the pages that they are included on, but they just seem to be dropped in there. This means that many of them aren't even really explained. In most self-help books that use this kind of concept, the "tips" are either used as headings then explained with supporting anecdotes and exercises, or are clearly and directly relevant to the section that they are included in. If this had been the case in this book, it could have significantly improved the flow of the writing and would have provided more specific take-away points.
Of course, this book is also a marketing tool to get you to go to the author's presentations and buy his services. Unfortunately this also comes across quite clearly at times.
However, despite these points, it's not all bad. There is some real content here and the points made are largely common sense and useful. From the wide range of self-help books that are out there, this wouldn't be the first one that I'd recommend, but if someone asked me whether it was worth a read, I would still say yes.
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