Wanders around Brisbane yesterday

A few pics:

Pushing through Mondays

2 Replies

For a lot of people, Mondays can be tough. Back to jobs you don’t like, working on things you don’t care about after weekends spent having fun and spending time with friends or watching all of your favourite shows on tv.

This is all great and I’m fine with this if you are happy with your lot, but so many people simply are not happy. Their complaints about Monday and how bad life is for them show they are just not seeing what is going on around them.

Most people reading this are based in the western world and live in a modern economy where jobs and opportunity are plentiful. If you are not happy with your life on a Monday and live for Friday night when you can finish work for the weekend, something is very wrong. Make some changes and get yourself back on track – in the world we live in today, you can do ANYTHING and it’s simply all down to you.

Why are you not happy? Do you want more ‘things’ in your life? Fancy cars and clothes and a new, more impressive phone maybe? Do you know what happiness means to you in your life, even? Have you taken stock and sat down to actually work out what it means to you? I suggest you do, and fast.

If you do this, you will make sure that your life is a happy one and empty of regrets. You will be honest with yourself and spend as much time as you can doing the things that make you happy and make them the real focus of your life. You will work out what your strengths are and put the maximum effort you can on these things. Every day will be the same because you are happy with where your life is going and what you do on any day of the week will be driving you towards the biggest goals in your life. How happy will you be when you achieve these goals? Massively, of course!

Turn off your tv and get to work on the definition of your future happiness and then make a plan to deliver it through hard work and laser-like focus. Be honest with yourself and good things will happen. Back yourself and let other people complain about their weaknesses (and yours, too) as you focus entirely on your greatest assets, your strengths. Do this and Mondays will become another day where the opportunities you have in front of you become clearer and clearer. Same as every other day.

The importance of building and maintaining strong relationships

We all make connections throughout our lives from a variety of different places. Some will remain strong no matter what is thrown at them, with others being much more professionally focussed, formal and subject to change at very short notice. The one thing that I know from a few years of experience is that developing lasting relationships in any sphere is a valuable asset and the effort that it takes to stay in touch with people and maintain contact is well worth it in the long run.

Work at it – pick up the phone and say hi to someone who has been off your radar for a while. Make a lunch appointment and switch your phone off and do some active listening and you could be surprised at what you find out. Make it a priority in the long and short term.

“What’s in it for me?” can be the thought that crosses your mind. “How can I get a return on this investment of my valuable time?” is another one that is hard to ignore, too. Well, the reality is that it’s just not possible to quantify the immediate tangible benefits of getting to know people better as a line in a spreadsheet, but the payback comes in time. A strong network can always be helpful and supportive friends who feel valued by you can make a huge difference in times of strife. Getting to know your colleagues better can also bear fruit in time and so make an effort when and where you can. It really is worth it.

Where panic finds its roots…

Natural positivity blocked by pessimism x fear = panic

(Source unknown)

Change the way you see your work

Take a couple of minutes to think about this quote above.

If you can shift your mindset a little, the possibilities can be endless. Have a think about it over the weekend and see what Monday brings…

Happy Friday from a very sunny and beautiful Sydney!

New sources of info and best practice

I’ve been doing a lot of research while I’m looking at the job market over the last couple of months and have had some good days – lots of new sources of information, leads into other new content, new authors to follow, etc. – and some very poor ones – the same old content from the same old sources, repackaged and refreshed for the latest round of posting.

Yesterday was a very good one. I revisited a few old haunts online and checked out a couple of industry-specific writers who I had overlooked when I was thinking about recruitment in months and years gone by. And there was some real gold in there.

I had shut down the part of my brain that was in research mode for a while, taking time not to go too deep into any area to see what I felt like on a lot of much broader topics that have always interested me but I have not had the time or inclination to follow up on. But I have switched back now to focussing on a small number of topics and getting to know as much about them as I can.

And it does pay off. Getting familiar and bang up-to-date on topics in a narrow sphere does feel more comfortable to me. And there does seem to be a repayment in coming across new ideas, writers, etc. when you narrow your focus that you might not spot if just skimming content. The cutting edge stuff will always be a bit harder to find and that is how it should be, but I am going to sick to this process and see where it leads.

Thought for today

“Whatever we focus on becomes our reality.”

I have no idea where this came from but it was in some of my old notes I came across just now. It makes perfect sense and is crucial to anyone wanting to be positive, move forward in their life and improve. Work hard to focus your mind on good things and they will come.

Preparation and why it matters

I had to take some tests yesterday. Nothing to be concerned about (until I find out how I did, of course) and related to employment but the process I undertook highlighted how easy it is to become very anxious if you are not prepared.

The tests were psychometrics on verbal, numerical and logical reasoning and not something that I have ever had to do before in a formal setting, i.e. going for a job. I have administered tests in the past and provided practice tests to students whilst working at a university a long time back, but doing them for myself was tough.

Thankfully there was an option for practice and also a lot of information on how to approach and take these tests online, so I spent as much time as I had – not a great deal – attempting a few of these practice tests and getting to grips with the question types, the ‘race against time’ that these tests are, plus trying to ensure I was as prepared as possible.

The testing process is very important in hiring decisions and has been used with great success for many years, predominantly as a support to the deeper process of interviewing and assessing competencies of candidates. If I had been presented with these tests yesterday, say, just following an interview and with no time to practice, I would have been in real trouble and it rammed home to me how important it is to be as prepared as you can be for the things that we get thrown at us in our lives.

I did not think at this stage in my career that I would be asked to do a raft of psychometric tests but the fact that I did has shown how crucial it is to never get complacent or think that you have all the bases covered. Be prepared for ANYTHING that can come at you. Take some time to step back and look at the bigger picture. Think about what’s on the table in any particular instance. What am I going to need to do in order to get over the line and make a success of this?

The Brand Called ‘You’

Tom Peters wrote this seminal article for Fast Company magazine a long time ago but it remains relevant, share-worthy and full of important justification for putting the effort into developing your own brand, whoever you are and whatever you do.

Read it here: https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you

The quick-read:

Big companies know that their brand matters and spend zillions on standing out
Become the CEO of ‘Me Inc.’
The web makes it easy for you to make your branding work through lighting up your efforts
Make your own plan and write your own pitch – what do you do that adds value?
Market it HARD and OFTEN, any/every which way you can
When you’ve built your brand, use the power it can give you, e.g. bigger, better projects
Every once in a while, reinvent yourself – new goals and ideas, new definitions of success? GO!!!!

Making a noise is only half the battle

Many businesses have kicked off their social media activity and then struggled to make the impact that everyone keeps telling them they should be. They are sharing pictures of their plush offices or the Friday morning bacon rolls on a very regular basis, also posting the ‘deal of the week’ or the odd bit of industry-specific information here and there, then waiting for the phone to ring with new sales and enquiries from customers and clients.

The reality is that it takes a lot more than this to make the right kind of impact and the work is in not only creating content and shouting loudly about it, but building communities around this content and growing loyalty and trust in those who follow you and your brand.

Think about car alarms. If you’re in a city centre, there is hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear one going off. When was the last time you actually stopped what you were doing and said, “Wow, listen to that car alarm! I’m going to go and find out where it is and see what’s going on”? When they were first developed, the sound of one blasting would often cause a commotion with a crowd gathering around the car to see what the problem was, but after a while, as people got used to the sound and frequency of alarms going off, they began to be ignored.

The noise generated by social media is now starting to work in the same way. Most businesses have their website, Facebook page and Twitter account and a great deal of fuss is made about the content that is created in the early days of their online presence. But as time goes by and the level of contact and engagement with followers on a regular basis dwindles, so do the interest of followers and the impact of the page decreases. That key marketing message you want to share to your followers six months down the line of creating your pages becomes just another car alarm and falls on deaf ears.

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, whose ideas have shaped the way we interact online as businesses and consumers, wrote ‘The Impact Equation’ back in 2012 and its key premise still holds true today, perhaps even more so – we need to be thinking about a mix of things to make people truly care about what we have to say when communicating with them online. A good idea will get us so far, but add an audience that trusts you and a following that can help spread our ideas and we are much more likely to make the kind of impact that gets results.

Take this idea to your own digital marketing efforts and think about where you are right now. Are you engaging with those who follow you and building their trust in your products and services over and over again? Are you regularly communicating your ideas to your followers or only when you have time? And do you have followers who actually read your content rather than just pass it by in their bulging news feed? If you feel you are hitting the right spot on all of these points with your target audience, well done and keep it going! But if you would like some help in getting better results than you are today, let’s talk about how I can help.

Picking the right tools and platforms for you and your business

The pressure to start using social media to promote yourself and your goods and services is coming from all angles. If you aren’t posting pictures on Instagram, are you going to miss out? If you don’t have 10,000 Twitter followers, are you going to be less successful than other competitors who do? How do you decide which platforms and tools are best for you and which ones will give you the best results for your time and effort?

The first thing to assess is where you live online for your personal profiles. If you are a happy Facebook user who is comfortable with the way that it works and you post a solid stream of updates there on a fairly regular basis, it might make sense for you to add a business page to Facebook and use it to build your business profile. If you have never used Twitter, don’t really understand how it works and find it hard to write short posts, jumping into Twitter for your business may not really make sense. Best to stay where you are comfortable while you are starting out and then try more things later when you are more confident.

Next, consider what kind of content you are going to be producing as this will have a big effect on the tools you use to deliver great results. If you’re an accountant, it’s unlikely that you will produce a lot of photos of your work and it is much more likely that you will be writing a lot of ‘how to’-type posts. In this case, jumping straight onto Instagram and creating a profile there may not be the wisest move to make and a WordPress blog supported by a Twitter account to enable sharing with your followers may make much more sense.

It would also pay huge dividends to look at your competitors and other key players in your sector and identify what is working really well for them. Using infographics to share highly factual and statistic-heavy chunks of information could mean that Instagram is worth a try but it might also be relevant to look at using infographics with lots of colour and images as one-off posts to give some variety to your written posts and draw in some new followers on a Facebook page. The competitor review is a key step in working out what is the best approach to take with the kind of people you are looking to engage with and will help you come up with a great plan. Results tend to be much stronger when you go to places where people are already engaged and then use similar tactics yourself than try to convert people to something new.

The key here is to avoid opening accounts on every platform in a rush to cover all bases and then use one account over all of the others and leave the rest to die a very slow and painful death. The other accounts will look very sad and empty when your customers or clients look you up online before deciding to do business with you and the impression you want to create is quite the opposite – regular, recent posts showcasing your products, knowledge, skills and services that encourage followers to learn more and start to engage with you and your brand.

Small businesses – get your message across to the right audience online

I have been developing my own ideas about personal branding and making the most of your opportunities to market yourself and your business online for a number of years now. I worked in the US in 2009 and got myself a Twitter account, then began to follow the likes of Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott and Gary Vaynerchuk as they paved the way for many digital marketing experts to emerge into a market that had no idea what the internet was capable of and how it would change everything we do. I then began video blogging about my running training and grew a small but loyal band of followers and then used my knowledge in my other entrepreneurial activities in recruitment, careers and coaching ever since.

Fast-forward seven years to today and the internet rules when it comes to marketing. Print media is dying a slow death and the traditional marketing budgets of the big players have moved online many years ago, catching our attention at every opportunity and creeping into our favourite tv shows, our news feeds on Facebook, our Twitter timeline and so on.

The early adopters are reaping the benefits of this captive audience – once you’ve liked a page, you’ll be seeing that brand’s every move and the offer you’ve been waiting for is surely not all that far behind. But it’s the small businesses and solo entrepreneurs who may be struggling to keep up with this runaway train – time is best spent on actually shipping and selling your product or providing your expert services and any time not spent doing this simply doesn’t pay the bills.

So I’m launching IMOFO Digital this week, with the sole aim of helping small businesses and those who work for themselves or in small teams to build their personal brand online to increase awareness and sales using the platforms we all use to connect and communicate every day. The power of the internet is there for us all to see but the ability to harness that power is sometimes a tricky task for those building their businesses and that’s where I can help.

You need compelling content to tempt new customers, leading to them pay attention to your message over the long term and get results.

You need to engage with your audience and show them that you’re listening and are there to help them.

You also need to stay aware of how and where your clients and customers are spending time online to be a part of their conversation and be at the front of their mind when it’s time to buy.

There will be a lot more on this topic coming as time goes by but I’m very excited to share my knowledge with some new clients and help them develop some spectacular results. If you are interested in finding out more, please get in touch via +61 (0)477 841 630 or mountford.ian@gmail.com.

Daily nudge

1 Reply

I have a daily email that has been coming to me for years now and it contains the following few words, adapted from a Tom Peters article on how to stay positive and keep moving forwards when things get tough in times of recession or unemployment:

Choose your attitude – consciously positive and enthusiastic
Take the lead
Listen intently
Learn something new
Help someone
Arrive early/leave late
Eye contact

I use a service called Nudgemail to get the message sent to my inbox every day and it has been a great way to keep this handy list front of mind when things don’t always go to plan. Can highly recommend doing the same thing with your own few words or phrases that keep you on track.

Aches and pains

I’m going through a patch where my body keeps breaking down on me and it is infuriating but part of the process of getting older. I run when I can and like to train for short races but my lower limbs are feeling the strain and it’s not as much fun to run, even in training, with constant pain.

If you’re a runner, you will understand that training with pain of some kind is inevitable as there is normally some small niggle or ache that develops or comes and goes as you continue through your session. But there are those that just won’t go away, and I have one of these at the moment.

Treatment of the issues at the heart of the problem is the only way to solve these kinds of issues. Strengthening of the muscles in and around the area of injury is also crucial and so it’s usually a longer journey to recovery and avoidance of any relapse than just a quick rub-down from a physio.

I’m just glad to have some active friends and relatives in Sydney who can hook me up with the right treatment and so I will be there as soon as I can to get back on the path to good health and some more racing. It’s the first day of spring today so I need to make the most of this southern hemisphere weather!

Focus on the good stuff

The process of making change is one that can add levels of frustration, anxiety and straight-up fear to lives that are already highly stressed and this isn’t always a good thing. Illness can follow very quickly behind if the change isn’t properly managed, whatever it’s context, so avoiding this has to be a top priority.

Our move to Sydney is still in progress as the container carrying our belongings is not yet with us and, so far, we have thankfully had few problems. But Katherine did get sick after only a couple of days in the country and this was very likely due to the scale of the change we had undertaken and the unsettled nature of what was ahead of us over the next few weeks of looking for accommodation, settling into a job and a new city, etc.

The frustration around the change I am going through at the moment is about the pace of it. Life in Australia does go a whole lot slower than it does in the UK and this can be difficult when you have little patience and are ready to start something new. A phone call or email not being returned seems to increase the overall level of tension and the ability to stay patient pays huge dividends.

I try to solve these little problems by thinking of all the things that have worked out well over the last few weeks as we have moved our lives and there are lots of them. It’s always beneficial, to me, anyhow, to keep a focus on the good stuff and the positives that are around me instead of the negatives and this does seem to do the trick. The negatives come easy and are always there without looking too hard, but make an effort to see past them and the dark clouds will start to lift a little.

Growth through change

It’s been a few weeks since I have written anything here because it’s been a time of big change. I’m now writing this from Sydney, Australia after moving here one week ago and the lead up to this change has been very hectic. House rented, belongings packed, plane tickets bought and accommodation secured does make it all sound very simple but I can assure you it isn’t!

Anyway, this time of change is also a big opportunity for growth in many ways. A new country – well, I was here 20 years ago and it has changed a lot since then – that is so far from the culture, weather and lifestyle that we had when in the UK will take some getting used to but that is part of its attraction.

I’m looking at getting back into employment so doing lots of research and adapting my mindset to being part of team again, even leading one if the opportunity presents itself. I’ve also got some time to think about doing some fresh learning in a new area and I haven’t drawn any conclusions from this yet.

Basically, every option is still open and this time of change is going to give some amazing opportunities for growth that will be fabulous as time goes by. There’s a lot to be very grateful for.

As a sidenote – current reading:
Chaos Monkeys – inside the Silicon Valley money machine, Antonio Garcia Martinez
The Inner Game of Golf – W. Timothy Gallwey
Homicide, David Simon

Race schedule for running:
Bay Run 7km this Sunday
City2Surf (CBD to Bondi Beach) on 14 August
Western Sydney half marathon on 1 October

Copying the habits of the greats

Getting into good habits is a step towards greatness in any area – sport, work, healthy living, you name it. If you can hardwire yourself to get out of bed and head straight to the gym or read for half an hour, you’ll feel good about your start to the day and the positivity this brings, even when times are tough, is not to be underestimated.

I like to think about people who could be classed as ‘masters’ at what they do and try and think about the things they have become so masterful at. I ask myself how they have gained these skills and what I can do to mirror their training and apply it to my own life.

At the end of the day, these are people who live and breathe the same way that you and I do and so it can’t be all that hard to be as good as them, right? Well, yes, but, in practice, it’s all about the effort we are all prepared to make to attain the levels that these people have achieved and this is the true test.

I read a lot, as much as I can find, about those who are on my ‘masters’ list and there a lot of common traits they all share:

hard, hard work from the moment they decided that they wanted to do whatever they did for ever more
discipline and focus to levels that others would consider to be strange and not worth the effort
determination to succeed in the face of doubters – colleagues, family, the press and media, etc.
high quality outputs at all times from them or their teams or people that they lead
political skills in order to handle difficulties that they come across as they navigate their work/non-work lives
failures on many levels in home and work life – lost opportunities, mistakes, bad decisions, misjudgments, loss of friends, divorce and so on.

So, what’s there to learn here? To me, it’s all about learning as much as possible from the biographical stories of these people’s lives and trying to make use of the positive aspects in our own lives. Hard work, discipline and focus are always key determinants of anyone considered to be a success of some kind so these should be the starting point of focus. Give it a try for yourself by making a ‘masters’ list and see what you can learn along the way.

Feed your mind

What you eat and when can have a huge impact on your outputs and overall effectiveness. Getting proper rest is also critical if you’re going to get the best out of yourself.

Any kind of stimulant – caffeine, alcohol, sugar, etc – at the back end of the day can really wreck your ability to sleep naturally and eating foods high in sugar, for example, at the start of the day can also create energy peaks and troughs at times when you don’t really want them.

I’m no nutritionist but my wife has studied nutrition in depth and has a great understanding of what works and why because she has suffered over the years from ME/chronic fatigue syndrome – a really horrible illness. The number one issue that has helped her to get away from this illness and now lead a normal life has been diet and there are some simple things that you can do to help you keep your focus and deliver when you really need to.

1 – Do some exercise, even if it’s only a walk, on a regular basis. Daily is best but manage what you can, when you can and get into a habit.

2 – Go for natural products and avoid processed foods where possible. Highly processed foods contain loads of sugar and fat which are not good for you at all. Your body has to work hard to get them through your system where natural foods are absorbed much quicker and leave you feeling fuller (and eating less overall).

3 – Find a regular sleep pattern. The more you can get on a regular basis, the better but it’s not always possible and we all do have to have a life! Getting proper sleep can help you to feel more energised in the mornings and this is always good.