A Simple Truth to Help You Make Informed Decisions

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by  John Ryan

My wife was having a medical procedure and it was one of those things that while we could get likely scenarios from our doctors, we wouldn’t know exactly what her situation was going to be until the day of the procedure. The doctors recommended waiting until we had the best information (the day of the procedure) and decide what we wanted to do right before the procedure. This last minute decision making about something so important, didn’t sit well with us. Our doctors were willing to talk to us a good deal about the general situation. One of them even ...

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Developing Personal Effectiveness Begins with Your Expectations

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by  John Ryan

You’ve likely heard the saying often attributed to Henry Ford, “Whether you believe you can or can’t do a thing, you’re right.” And I think this is terribly insightful and important when developing your personal effectiveness. I can’t tell you how often I come across people who say things like, “I’m just no good at public speaking.” This is a big obstacle for a lot of people. And here’s the problem with the belief that you’re not good at public speaking…you’ll likely create more of what you expect in the future. This is the big problem with negative beliefs about ...

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Do Presentation Skills Matter?

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by  John Ryan

You may have seen the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry Seinfeld jokes about how most people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. Now this may not literally be the case, but when surveyed, a fear of public speaking ranks higher than a fear of death. For many people standing up and giving a presentation to a group of people is a truly terrifying experience. If you love making presentations, then I have some good news for you, if you hate it, then my news is not so great. In order to be a 7 percenter, a top performer, ...

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A Small Change that Can Help Employees Overcome Low Self Esteem

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by  John Ryan

You may have heard before that a key to building your employees self esteem is to praise and praise often. This sounds like great advice, but there is a right and a wrong way to offer compliments. Strangely enough praise can be a double-edged sword. It feels great in the moment when we hear applause or we are told that we’ve done a wonderful job on something, but this is not long-lived. Consider this scenario, a child grows up hearing how beautiful she is.  What are the long term implications of this? She may begin to tie up all of ...

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Rituals of Success

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by  John Ryan

When you travel, your time home with your family becomes that much more important. Recently, my wife and I realized that if we didn’t have a good greeting at the airport, then our time together would be off as well. Not bad, just off. So we decided to create a ritual. I put together a playlist of songs that she and I both like and put them on our respective iPods. When the airplane touched down, I texted her to start her playlist and I started mine. That way we were both listening to the same songs and we were listening to ...

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