Business Insight Zone

Feeling a little windswept these days?

I admit it — I’m a sucker for self-help reading. This is true anytime, but I’ve found that I’ve read even more of this stuff as the economy has soured. It’s not that I’m worried about work (we’re doing fine, thanks), but that I’m trying to figure out how I can be of more help to those around me in tougher times.

One way to be more helpful, I figure, is to take personal lessons and generalize them. This fits in with my overall idea that individual and organizational issues often echo one another; it also lets me take a moderately useful self-help post like this one . . .

10 Killer, Daily Habits to Boost Your Confidence

. . . and put it to immediate use in the workplace. Even if some of what these articles talk about is too touchy-feely for you, many of the lessons in them can be adapted on the fly to fit business needs:

• “Start Each Day Alert and Ready for Action” — Kickstart your days during hard times. Instead of fetching coffee and checking e-mail during your first half-hour at work, jump into something vital. In the time it would have taken you to warm up for the day, you can scratch something off your to-do list instead.
• “Operate from a Position of Generosity” — When times are tough, people seem to appreciate a kind word more than ever, and kindness costs very little.
• “Connect with Your Life Purpose” — Replace “life” with “business” (or, better yet, align them so they’re synonymous) and you’ll channel your energy better throughout the workweek.

Even better is when you come across a self-help item that’s explicitly aimed at work or career-building. Here are two that I’ve enjoyed lately:

• ZenHabits: 10 Steps to Take Action and Eliminate Bureaucracy – The great thing here is that every move YOU make along these lines encourages action and reduces bureaucracy for your co-workers, too. This improves your organization while potentially making you a folk hero.
• SocialMediaToday: 25 Ways to Fail and Come Out on Top – In this one, Valeria Maltoni gives a potpourri of advice that might be more than you can digest in one sitting. Better (in my book), she’s not trying to be overly creative or original, but rather trying to focus on the best advice that has helped her own career along. You could bookmark this one and come back to it daily for weeks, taking away new lessons for yourself and your team it each time.

I’ve also written my fair share of self-help and productivity pointers (and gathered some of the best ones here). You could start from those posts and figure out all kinds of ways to relieve your own stress and the stress of those around you by better focusing and executing on what’s most important.

But while we’re at it, you might take a minute to look at two more posts that don’t fit within the genre of self-help, but might show you why you need it:

• Stress kills.
• Stress kills, redux: the best short piece I’ve read about stress.

Stress is serious business, and it’s seriously costly — to your health and your bottom line — when you’re trying to DO business.

Use self-help reading, exercise, rock-climbing, play-time with your kids, or whatever-it-is that helps YOU to combat stress . . . but be SURE that you don’t leave yourself in the position of a palm tree in a hurricane, stuck in place and with nothing to do but hope that you’ll make it.

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Photo by Chrysaora, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Category: Productivity, The working life