Quick Flow Charts and Mind Maps with Visme Tool

Visme, the free presentation infographic creation on-line tool, has a new feature for quickly and easily creating process flow charts or visual mind maps.  The 1+ minute video below rapidly shows how the new tool works.

Breaks Proven to Increase Business Productivity

Do you think you are getting more done by not taking breaks or skipping lunch?  Actually doing this decreases your productivity as it can lead to both mental and physical fatigue.  You do not believe that?  Check out these articles and posts that support taking breaks.

Why take breaks?
Forbes Want To Get More Done? Try Taking More Breaks
Taking a Break Can Boost Your Productivity
Smart Business Advantages of taking work breaks to boost productivity
Science-Backed Ways Taking a Break Boosts Our Productivity
Psychology Today How Work Breaks Help Your Brain
Up Your Productivity by Random Work Sprints Vs Marathon Time

How to do breaks?
Creativity Break Ideas to Boost Your Productivity at Work
Fast Company 15, 30, and 60-minute breaks to boost productivity

How to do lunch?
Rules of effective lunch breaks that boost your productivity
Zero Eating Healthy Meals and Snacks for Workplace Success blog post includes 3 infographics:

1. How to prevent getting hungry at work
2. Tips to eat healthier at work
3. How to tell if you are dehydrated

In Control or Being Controlled?

"You're just like you were ten years ago. You never change!" Have you ever heard that comment directed at you? Do you believe it? This statement could be either very positive or very negative. It all depends on the context of the conversation and the specific tone of voice used. Your primary question today is, am I in control or being controlled by the changes in my environment?

How do you use your time as compared to 5, 10 or 15 years ago? What are you doing today with all the changes in technology, communication not to mention the radical changes happening in our economy that were not part of the horizon 10-15 years ago? Things have changed. Guess what, the way you live your life has changed, whether you like it, hate it, realize it or not.

You are in a process of change that's called life. Sometimes you like the changes, sometimes not. Sometimes you can understand and deal with the changes; sometimes it’s much more difficult. What do you need to remember? You are changing because you are alive. And believe it or not, you can control many of the changes you incur if you understand the change process and stop fighting every step of the way. The human side of change should not be like having okra and boiled squash for dinner. Yuk! It really can be enjoyable.

People become what they think about. They change and direct their lives just as the navigator changes and directs the course of any great ship. People change themselves first on the inside by changing their minds. No one can change your mind for you. Likewise, no one can control your mind unless you relinquish that control to them. The last of the great human freedoms has to be the choice of our response to the stimulus pressed upon us.

You may not always be able to control the changing circumstances around you but you can always control how you think and react to those circumstances. James Allen aptly paraphrased the scripture when he said, "A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts."

The right kind of change begins on the inside, in the mind. When you learn how to operate the control panel (your mind), you begin to take greater control of your life. There are simple methods and a proven program where you can learn how to control your mind and program it in such a way that you stay in control even when times are tumultuous and turbulent.

Your mind holds onto every piece of information that is repeatedly programmed into it. That’s why it’s extremely important that you control and direct the input and purposefully decide what you want to feed it. With the right information fed into it on a consistent daily basis, your mind will believe and act on whatever direction it is given. With disciplined practice your mind can become your greatest ally and friend. Your mind can be the master or the monster of change. It's your decision.

Success Law 7: The Law of Mind

Seven Laws that Guarantee Your Career and Business Success

Last time, we left off at the law of correspondence. The seventh and final law is the law of Mind - or sometimes called the law of mental equivalency. This is in many respects a summary of all the previous laws. Your thoughts charged with emotion and held with tenacity will objectify themselves and become your reality. Thoughts are things! It was defined well by Earl Nightingale as the strangest secret, when he said “you become what you think about.”

Thoughtfulness is a special skill that when practiced rigorously will bring powerful results into your life. When you are living the law of mind you literally take control of your life and all aspects of it by controlling your thinking. It is ‘mind control’ and you are the one doing it. Your thoughts direct you and your outcomes in the direction you desire because you are controlling the outer by controlling the inner.

Now, think about your career and business success. Is it what you would like it to be? Are you truly doing what you want to do and using your talents or strengths in a way that gives you pleasure and great productivity? Are you accomplishing the goals you wanted to accomplish and enjoying all the commensurate rewards that go with that type of achievement? You can immediately begin to shape or reshape the direction and outcomes of your life by directing your thinking in a proven, results oriented manner. With a competent coach or mentor who will encourage you, this process and the enjoyment of it can become yours much sooner.

Thank you for joining me in from the beginning of my Seven Laws that Guarantee Your Career and Business Success series of posts. I hope you’ve enjoyed the insights we’ve shared for your career and business success. Until we meet again with a new series of posts, adios amigos!

Anger at Work – What can you do about it?

In my last post, I shared the results of anger at work and promised to give you some ideas to overcome the emotion of anger in this post.

Here are some tips for turning anger into a productive tool of leadership:

• When you feel anger arising in you, listen to what it is telling you. Feel the emotion. Experience what the emotion feels like in your body. Ask yourself what this is signaling. What is the offense? Don’t dismiss it. Consider appropriate action.
• Plan to address the situation. Distinguish between clean anger and damaging anger. Clean anger is communicated directly with no intent to damage or harm another. It is honest and direct. Damaging anger is when emotions are out of control, as in yelling, name calling and blaming. It can also damage when it is expressed “passive aggressively” – i.e.: ignoring someone, not returning their phone calls, degrading them to others.
  A useful format to express clean anger goes like this:
  When you do , I feel /or here is how it affects me: .
  Example: “When you arrive late to meetings I feel angry and frustrated. It also reduces the effectiveness of our team meetings. It interrupts the flow of the team’s time together and we waste time catching you up. I need to know if you are willing to change to be on time in the future.”
• Make an Anger List using the three questions below to determine your ability to confront anger in your life. Scan through your list and see how directly you are communicating. Do you see patterns of avoidance? Are you stewing over some incident? Pick one or two items you will address.
  1. Who Am I Angry With?
  2. What Happened?
  3. What Was Communicated?

I hope you found my posts on anger at work helpful. Please use these ideas and feel free to share proven techniques of your own with our readers by using the comments feature on this blog.

NOTE: These three posts were adapted from a longer article I wrote in May 2008.