Author: American Business Women's Association

Is Fear Holding You Back From Achieving Your Goals?

by American Business Women's Association | May 1, 2020 | Uncategorized

Is Fear Holding You Back from Achieving Your Goals?  By Angela Civitella

Research first diagnosed the fear of success a couple of decades ago. The findings, at the time, related to fear of success in women, and the results proved incredibly controversial.

Since then, however, most scientists and psychologists agree that the fear of success exists for both men and women. Fear of success is similar to the fear of failure. They have many of the same symptoms, and both fears hold you back from achieving your dreams and goals.

Signs of Fear of Success

The biggest problem for many people is that their fear of success is largely unconscious. They just don’t realize that they’ve been holding themselves back from doing something great.  If you experience the following thoughts or fears, you might have a fear of success on some level:

• You feel guilty about any success you have, no matter how small, because your friends, family, or co-workers haven’t had the same success.
• You don’t tell others about your accomplishments.
• You avoid or procrastinate on big projects, especially projects that could lead to recognition.
• You frequently compromise your own goals or agenda to avoid conflict in a group or even conflict within your family.
• You self-sabotage your work or dreams by convincing yourself that you’re not good enough to achieve them.
• You feel, subconsciously, that you don’t deserve to enjoy success in your life.
• You believe that if you do achieve success, you won’t be able to sustain it. Eventually, you’ll fail and end up back in a worse place than where you started. So, you think, “why bother?”

What are the Causes?

The fear of success has several causes:

• We fear what success will bring, for example: loneliness, new enemies, being isolated from our family, longer working hours, or being asked for favors or money.
• We’re afraid that the higher we climb in life, the further we’re going to fall when we make a mistake.
• We fear the added work, responsibilities, or criticism that we’ll face.
• We fear that our relationships will suffer if we become successful. Our friends and family will react with jealousy and cynicism, and we’ll lose the ones we love.
• We fear that accomplishing our goals, and realizing that we have the power to be successful, may actually cause an intense regret that we didn’t act sooner.

Overcoming the Fear of Success

 You can use several different strategies to overcome your fear of success. The good news is that the more you face your fears, bring them to the surface, and analyze them rationally, the more you’re likely to weaken those fears – and dramatically reduce your reluctance to achieve your goals.

Take a realistic look at what will happen if you succeed with your goal. Don’t look at what you hope will happen, or what you fear will happen. Instead, look at what is likely to happen.

It’s important not to give a quick answer to this. Take at least 15 minutes to examine the issues, and write down your answers to questions like:

• How will my life change?
• What’s the worst that could happen if I achieve this goal?
• What’s the best that could happen?
• Why do I feel that I don’t deserve to accomplish this goal?
• How motivated am I to work toward this goal?
• What am I currently doing to sabotage, or hurt, my own efforts?
• How can I stop those self-sabotaging behaviors?

Another useful technique is to address your fears directly, and then develop a backup plan that will overcome your concern. For instance, suppose you don’t push yourself to achieve a promotion, and the biggest reason is because you secretly fear that the additional income and recognition would jeopardize your family relationships and your integrity. You’re worried that you would be so busy working to maintain your success that you’d never see your family, and you might be forced to make choices that would destroy your integrity.

To overcome these fears, start by addressing your workload. You could set a rule for yourself that you’ll always be home by 7 p.m. You could tell this to your boss if you’re offered the new position.

For issues involving integrity, you always have a choice. If you set maintaining your integrity as your top goal, then you’ll always make the right choice. By creating backup plans that address your fears, you can often eliminate those fears entirely.

The Takeaway

Fear of success is common, and many of us don’t realize that we have it. If this is your current situation, it’s time to let go of the chains that are holding you back from reaching the ultimate level of success in all that you do. Trust me, once you break free, you’ll never look back.

Angela Civitella is a certified business management coach and the founder of Intinde. www.intinde.com

Networking for Introverts

by American Business Women's Association | May 1, 2020 | Uncategorized

Networking for Introverts – by Ted Janusz

Studies show that up to 93 percent of adults consider themselves shy. And those studies were conducted even before we were encouraged to avoid others by adopting the practice of social distancing and to don the facial attire worn by bank robbers.

Is it any wonder then that when you now go to a social gathering, you may feel uncomfortable?  You may look around the room and think (probably in error), “Everybody here knows each other!” or “I knew it was a bad idea to come here!” or “Everybody is looking at me!”

Relax. There is a good chance that most of the room is feeling just as you are.  To advance both personally and professionally, we need to engage with people. And sometimes we just need to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

To lessen your anxiety, here are six things you can do:

• Determine in advance your reasons for attending a social event. If necessary, write out the reasons on the back of a business card and sneak a look at the card while you are at the event. You will find that you can do just about anything in life if your why is strong enough. The real secret to successful time management is to constantly ask oneself, “Is this the best use of my time right now?” If so, go to the event and make the best of it. If not, go do something else.
• Plan what you will say when you meet another person at the event. If you can make your opening statement interesting, or better yet humorous, the conversation can get off to a great start. For instance, at a wedding, one guest introduced herself by saying, “Hello! I am a former girlfriend of the groom’s father!”
• Go with a friend. You may know people at the event your friend is unfamiliar with, and vice versa. You can introduce your friend to others and say things about your friend that he may socially be unable to say about himself. And he can do the same for you! Speaker Patricia Fripp says, “It’s like being with your own PR person. We say about each other that which we would not say about ourselves.”
• Look for a person standing alone. “The person, who is speaking to no one, would welcome your conversation,” notes Susan RoAne, “The Mingling Maven,” and best-selling author of How to Work a Room: The Ultimate Guide to Making Lasting Impressions – in Person and Online. “Just because someone is standing alone doesn’t mean he or she is a snob or “unimportant.” People who are alone may be shyer than you.” Perhaps she is hidden under the fake palm tree, clutching a drink in her hands. Chances are, she is repeating those three statements (lies) at the beginning of this article. If you go over and introduce yourself to her, you may have a new best friend for life!
• Pretend you are a talk show host. Treat the person across from you as the most important guest of the evening. What questions (and answers) would your viewers or listeners want to have discussed? As a good host, make the conversation be about the guest, and not about you.
• When the other person begins to talk, listen. I believe that empathetic listening has three parts: 1) listen with your ears (obviously), but also 2) listen with your eyes, and 3) listen with your heart. Instead of planning your response, anxiously waiting for the other person’s lips to stop moving so that you can talk, take the time to be present with the other person.

Listen … Truly Listen

Best-selling author Stephen Covey asked, “Do we listen to understand? No! We listen to reply.”  Let me relate the concept of empathetic listening to something I experienced recently. My wife took me into her garden to show off her phlox, mums or rhododendron. I’m not really sure because I am not into gardening. But I am into my relationship with my wife. So rather than thinking at the time about an upcoming presentation I was about to give, I needed to slow down and be in the moment with her.

Always take the time to truly be with the person with whom you are speaking. Do not constantly scan the room for somebody even “more important.”

How to Make Others Love (or Like) You

English journalist Jenni Murray talked about meeting former president Bill Clinton, “He made you feel for those few short moments that you were the only woman in the world and he’d never met anyone as interesting or as lovely as you.” Similarly, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis seemed to possess the ability to have men all over the world fall in love with her. Asked how she did it, the former First Lady replied, “Two ways.  First of all, when a man would finish talking about himself and his work, I would say, ‘Tell me more!’”

(I can only imagine the nervous guy thinking to himself at this point, “Oh, nobody has ever asked me about quim-quat widgets before, but here goes …” We guys and our egos!)

Secondly, as the wife of a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, Jacqueline revealed, “I would hang on their eyes.”

Can you just imagine how powerful that effect must have been?  Now, you may not want women or men all over the world to fall in love with you. You may only want to survive your next social gathering. However, you can adapt Mr. Clinton’s or Ms. Onassis’s strategies to help you achieve your goal.

F – O – R – D

If you tend to be an analytical type (and many shy people consider themselves to be), when you meet a new person, imagine the blue oval of the carmaker Ford emblazoned on her forehead. It will give you clues as to what you can talk about with your conversation partner.

The F stands for “Ask her about her family.” (Everybody has a family.)

The O references her occupation. That does not necessarily mean a paying job. My wife was a stay-at-home-mom, one of the most difficult jobs in the world. She was offended when somebody had the attitude, “Oh, you don’t really work!” So, occupation could even refer to a present vocation, for instance, a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or some other charitable organization.

The R means relaxation. Ask her what she likes to do for fun!

And if you really feel you have hit it off with your new acquaintance, ask her about D, her dreams.

Don’t Try to Impress, Ask Questions Instead

Another successful networking strategy is to ask questions rather than attempting to impress another person by talking about yourself.

I was interviewing for my first job out of graduate school. The firm sent a new hire who was a recent graduate to interview prospective employees from his alma mater. When it was my turn to sit down with him, I asked him about his experiences in graduate school – about the professors, the fraternities and sororities. The interviewer was thoroughly enjoying himself regaling me with interesting stories. When it was finally my turn to launch into my sales pitch, the interviewer interrupted me by saying, “Ted, you are exactly the kind of person we want working at our firm!”

Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, said, “Everybody has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, ‘Make me feel important.’ Never forget this message when working with [or meeting] people.”

What To Do If You Struggle With Small Talk

I thought when I would attend a social event I would need to develop an elevator pitch or some other pithy story, so that when another person would hear it, they would be forced to take a step back and exclaim, “Wow, Ted! That is so profound! Let me hire you right now!”

It isn’t going to happen. So don’t put that kind of pressure on yourself, either. Simply engage in small talk.

“Small talk,” says author Michael Korda, “should intrigue, delight, amuse, fill up time pleasantly. Given that, anything will do, from dogs to delicatessens. The aim of small talk is to make people feel comfortable – to put them at their ease – not to teach, preach or impress.

It’s a game, like tennis, in which the object is to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible.”

Networking … the Right Way

We have all been to a Chamber of Commerce mixer or some similar networking event, at which one of the attendees does networking the wrong way.  His goal is to meet everybody in the room and to get right down to what he wants to accomplish.  He’ll run up to you and say, “Hi!” while thrusting his business card into your hand. “I’m John. I fix computers. If you ever need your computer fixed, call me.”

Before you even have a chance to respond, John will rush off to his next … victim.

“I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful,’ says Keith Ferazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time. “It was about working hard to give more than you get. Those who are best at it don’t network – they make friends. The only way to get people to do anything is to recognize their importance and make them feel important.”

6 Things To Consider If You Are In A Workplace Romance

by American Business Women's Association | Feb 7, 2020 | Uncategorized

As Valentine’s Day approaches, love is in the air. But, if you are in a relationship with a co-worker or thinking about starting one, there’s plenty that you can do to avoid embarrassment, hurt or disruption for yourself and your colleagues. What should you know?  Angela Civitella is a former executive, certified business leadership coach and founder of Intinde.

She Says There Are Six Things To Consider:

• Check your organization’s HR policy: Many organizations have their own policies on workplace relationships. For example, some companies frown upon one partner managing the other. It’s not that your boss doesn’t want you to be happy, there are larger considerations such as breaches of compliance, conflicts of interest, or inappropriate collusion. The safest option is to ask your HR department if it has a policy in place, and to let your HR Advisor know if you are in a workplace relationship.
• Consider your company’s culture: Even if it’s not written into HR policy, you need to get a feel for your organization’s cultural view on workplace relationships. This is especially important if you are working abroad, or in an organization with a different culture from your own.
• Agree to an approach with your partner: Chances are, your colleagues and co-workers already know that you “have a crush” on the redhead in the sales team or the “hunk” in communications, and they may already suspect that it has blossomed into a relationship. You have to decide with your partner how you’ll behave at work. Do you “come clean” and let your colleagues know what’s going on? Or, do you join the third of workplace couples who decide to keep their relationship a secret? Discuss whether to set some boundaries at work, such as not spending too much time alone together, or agreeing not to use your “pet names” for one another
• Stay professional at work: Your colleagues might approve of your office romance and think you’re the best-matched couple since Romeo and Juliet, but you still need to tread carefully. Indulging in in-jokes, private conversations, and public displays of affection can make your co-workers feel awkward. And if you and your partner are eating lunch together in the staff restaurant, other colleagues may not know whether you want privacy or would welcome the extra company. Why not invite a few more people along? Even if they decline your invitation, you have made the offer. If you discuss business matters together – or, worse still, make business decisions – while your co-workers are absent, it will likely cause resentment. If you’re managing your partner, you need to be especially mindful of your professional interactions, and be seen to be extra careful to treat your other team members equally and fairly.
• Be prepared for gossip! Human beings are social animals, and we connect with one another by sharing stories and experiences. And the more exciting or shocking those stories, the more engaging they become. So, even if you rigorously follow the rules and are careful with your actions, some people may be quick to make assumptions and to see favoritism or nepotism that’s just not there. It’s a kind of fake news.
• Plan for the worst: What if the relationship ends? You have to remain professional if your workplace relationship comes to an end, no matter what the reason. This can be a difficult time for you, your ex-partner, and your colleagues, especially if you still have to work closely together. An acrimonious split can poison the atmosphere in the workplace, and impact productivity and morale. If you manage your ex-partner, make sure that you don’t discriminate against them, or you and your organization risk being the subject of a grievance procedure. Don’t get involved in “muck-raking” or “washing your dirty linen in public,” even if your former partner does.

Written By:  Angela Civitella, a former executive, certified business leadership coach and founder of Intinde.

The Most Popular Solopreneur Jobs Nationwide for 2020

by American Business Women's Association | Jan 10, 2020 | Uncategorized

One of the biggest misconceptions about becoming your own boss is that you have to create a grand business plan in order to be successful. Luckily, that isn’t always the case. There are options to do what you love and provide services that can allow you the freedom of being self-employed. If you love to teach, bake, create, provide child care, get people organized, then you can become your own boss! All you have to do is decide on the service you can provide and make your dream a reality!

Business.org is ready to help American’s ditch the “9 to 5” and become their own boss in 2020. But which dreams are American’s most likely to pursue? It turns out that entrepreneurs who want to go solo (like an entrepreneur but doing it solo), have quite a few options they’re exploring. Using data from Google Trends, we found around 30 frequently searched solopreneur jobs. We then broke those jobs down by state to figure out where, exactly, each solopreneurial venture is most popular. Check out the full report to each state’s results.”

Here are some interesting findings about on the most popular solopreneur jobs nationwide for 2020.

• Surprising absolutely no one, California’s top-ranked solopreneur job is social media influencer
• A little more surprising? “Social media influencer” was also the most-searched term in Illinois and Texas—two lovely
  states, of course, but both with a much lower reputation for stardom than La-La Land.
• Estheticians had the most-searched solopreneur job in Hawaii (spa treatments clearly go hand in hand with paradise-
  seeking vacationers).
• People in Idaho and Utah seem to need a little extra encouragement; life coaching came in first in both states.
• “Amazon seller” took first place in three states thousands of miles apart: Florida, Nevada, and New Jersey. Obviously,
  solopreneurs can follow Amazon’s motto (“Work Hard. Have Fun.”) no matter where in the US they live.