The Career Introvert

There are two words that can send a shiver down the spine of any professional worker, leading to cold sweats and shaking knees and all kinds of other symptoms – public speaking.

Many people fear public speaking. It’s something that can start in high school and stay with you for the rest of your life. But unfortunately, for many people, public speaking is unavoidable, and you need to push through it for the sake of your career.

Want to grow your confidence in public speaking? Take a look at some useful tips below.

Get a mentor

Having a mentor can be a fantastic way of boosting your career. One of the main benefits of mentoring is having someone experienced in your industry give you useful advice and help you along your career path. This can lead to more self-confidence which can be an asset when it comes to public speaking. A mentor doesn’t have to be someone within your workplace, and you could find yourself developing a long-lasting relationship with some who has your interests at heart.

Be inspired

If you’re looking to develop a style of public speaking, why not observe how others do it? There are all kinds of ways you can observe someone speaking publicly, from watching the news to attending lectures and conferences and even watching recordings on YouTube. Experts in their field who show passion and enthusiasm can be inspiring to watch. Serik Burkitbayev is a great example of someone who’s passionate about the work they do, inspiring others with ideas on sustainability and energy. Find the people who inspire you and take notes about their approaches.

Get some professional help

Like many things, public speaking is something that can be learned, but you need to be willing to put the work in. You can hire a professional public speaking coach who can help you overcome your nerves and develop techniques that will help you master the art of public speaking and make a splash. Getting help with public speaking can help grow your confidence in other areas of your life too, while also being useful when it comes to other nerve-wracking situations such as job interviews. Some employers can offer courses and training in public speaking, so it’s worth exploring what your options are.

Practice

The phrase ‘practice makes perfect’ has never been truer than when it comes to public speaking. Practicing your presentation skills can help you develop a more natural delivery style and make sure that you can communicate clearly what you’re trying to say. Practicing your skills will help you ace your next public speaking engagement and put those nerves to bed for good.

Public speaking can be one of the most difficult parts of your job. Whether you’re the CEO or the most junior member of the team, nerves can get the better of you, which leads to public-speaking dread. Work on growing your public speaking confidence to help you succeed and take that stage by storm.

As a business owner, it is so important that you work on improving the way you do things and improving your business at the same time. There are so many factors that play a part in this, and you need to do as much as possible to improve things for the future. You have to make sure you try to improve yourself as a business owner, not to mention taking steps to understand the best ways of making sure you take the company forward.

If you are serious about improving yourself and your management skills, you need to work on the best ways of doing this. Think about what you do to improve your business management skills moving forward because this is going to improve things for your business. The modern world comes with so many challenges for business owners, and these are some of the things you can do to make sure you improve your skills moving forward.

Take Inspiration from Other Professionals

One of the best things you can do as a modern business owner is to take inspiration from other successful business people. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind as a business owner and is such a great way of getting better at your role. Reading about people like Philip McTigue of NY is an excellent way of getting the inspiration you need, and following the example of people like this.

Build Your Confidence

Confidence is one of the biggest factors involved when it comes to managing and running a business. You have to be comfortable and confident with who you are and what you are trying to achieve. Building your confidence and working on how you can ace your next public speaking engagement is so important. There are a lot of things you are going to need to get right when it comes to improving this, and you have to make sure you understand your business and your role in it as much as possible. Developing your skills and education will help to improve and boost your confidence that little bit more as well.

Learn New Things

Learning new things about who you are and the skills you have is really important for the future. You can use this to help you get better at your job and deal with your business more completely. This is why you need to learn new things that are going to help you do your job better, and it is important that you get this right as much as you can. You can always improve and learn more, and the important thing is to look at ways of achieving this.

Communicate Better

Communication is one of the copre pillars of business, and you need to improve the way you communicate with your staff. As a business owner, one of the most important things you can do is to communicate more with your staff. If you can improve this, you will become a much better manager, and you will make your business more efficient and productive at the same time.

As you can see, there are plenty of great things you can do that are going to help you improve this as much as possible. It is essential that you do what you can to improve the company and its success, and this links well to the idea that you need to improve your management as well. Do as much as you can to improve your management skills using these ideas to make you better at your job.

No-one ever said that being an entrepreneur was easy. It’s well known to be a demanding but rewarding choice, with small business owners often giving most of their time, a lot of hard work and a fair amount of sacrifice to get their enterprise off the ground. If you have started a business, then you’re probably already used to the feeling of juggling lots of competing priorities, burning the candle at both ends to get everything done and looking at a to-do list which never seems to get any smaller. However, we are human beings, not robots, and if you don’t learn to introduce some  balance to your day, your health will end up suffering. Any successful businessperson has learnt the lesson – often the hard way – that there have to be boundaries in place in order for you and your company to prosper. But just how do you find more balance in your working days?

Maximise Your Time With Logic

You may not be able to create more than 24 hours in a day, but you can certainly become smarter about how you use the time you have available. First of all, work out when you are at your most productive. For many people, this tends to be in the morning, due to their circadian rhythms. Allocate this time to work on deep-dive projects which require focus and creative input. Resist the temptation to check emails until after your most productive time, otherwise you’ll get dragged off into things which you can deal with when you aren’t quite so focused. Use a prioritisation matrix to decide which five tasks are the most important for the day – don’t make your list so long you have no hope of completing it, as that is demotivating.

Create The Right Environment

Whether you work from home or have a hot desking space, or even rent your own business premises, creating an environment which makes you more productive is a great idea. This can be as simple as making sure your environment is the correct temperature, that the walls are painted a great colour and that your office is somewhere you actually want to spend time. Invest in good office storage solutions to make sure that clutter isn’t slowing you down and draining your mental energy. If you work mainly alone from your home, consider breaking up the week by finding a local coffee shop with Wi-Fi where you can take a working break. Some people even find that a white noise machine can be helpful to help them get more work done and sustain concentration.

Acknowledge Your Limits
No one can do it all alone, so if it’s time to expand and think about consolidated staffing, then make sure you do. Recruiting new hires is time-consuming, but in the long run, not having the right people around will slow you down and stop your business from being able to expand. Work with a recruitment professional to find great candidates and have them screened for you with all the relevant legal checks to make the whole process smooth. Bringing an expert into your business will always pay off.

Your business is in its founding stages, and it needs a few boosts to be able to go further. And most of all, it needs to have a good team on hand to spearhead it into success and prosperity! You, as the owner and founder, need a team of people with the right skills around you, who know what they’re doing, and can take initiative whenever the opportunity presents itself. And all in all, you need an expert or two to help you out.

But how can you be sure that you’re getting one? Let’s make sure you can spot the signs of a real expert when one walks into the interview. It’ll be a real boost for your business if you have a talent for talent!

They’re Not a Know It All (a.k.a., they listen)

If you want to have an expert on hand, either to write some copy for your website or to design the graphics you’re thinking of putting on the side of the company vehicles, they need to be someone who listens to you first. They need to be attentive to what you want to see, or what you want to read, before they pitch their own ideas. Most of all, they need to be receptive to what you have to say, and not simply brush it aside! This is your business, after all, and they’re only here to help.

So if you’re dealing with an expert, they’ll be professional about everything they have to say and do. They’ll be pleasant, they’ll have some ideas to ping off of you, and they’ll note down everything that it is you want from them and their work. If they’re a know it all, they’re unlikely to do any of these things!

They Have a Portfolio (or something similar)

An expert is someone who has past work to show you, and is able to present relevant work, if they have it. Of course, there’s a lot of talented people out there without portfolios, but they should still have something to show you to prove to you that they’re the one for your business.

If you want to hire an expert, or to just use the services of one for the foreseeable future, you need to be able to do your research. They might have a social media profile where they post snippets of what they’re working on. They might have a website that proves they’re a truck crash expert. They might just have a reference or two from people they’ve worked for before, who were in a similar position to you, and had their problems solved by the person in front of you.

You can go all the way through a hiring process, and bring on someone you feel really good about –  but then their subsequent work turns up subpar, and you don’t have the time or resources to train them, and you start to doubt your ability to run your business. So know how to identify!

Public Speaking can leave the calmest and most collected person breaking out in a sweat. We can’t all deliver awe-inspiring speeches, a la Barack Obama, but there are small things that we can do to make sure that our own presentations go off without a blip.

Practice, Practice, Practice.

Of course, you’ll need to rehearse your presentation quite a few times. It may seem tricky to take several minutes out of your day, but try to think of a few minutes you’ll have alone to run over what you’ve written. Another common practice is to record yourself talking, it will give you a chance to hear how you’ll be heard by your audience, catch any typos or grammatical errors and will allow you to time yourself, as it’s easy to speed ahead when you’re feeling a tad nervous. Even get your family or roommates in on the action, they’re bound to give you helpful feedback that may help when it comes to the big day. While you don’t have to read directly from your notes, it’s always a good idea to have them on hand, instead of just winging it.

Get in the zone

Accept that nervousness is a totally normal, human emotion. Feeling nervousness engages our ‘fight or flight’ response and in turn produces adrenaline, which will help you think faster, speak more eloquently, and add passion and enthusiasm whilst you convey your message. Some use this extra boost to take a boxing class beforehand or sit down for some quiet meditative contemplation. No matter what you choose, make sure you’re in the right headspace before you’re at the front.

Come Prepared

Going back to ensuring that you know your topic inside out, there’s no point in being pumped and ready to go and present, only to find out that your notes have been lost in the Cloud or that your laptop has failed you. Company experts like Prosource Technology Solutions, specialise in ways for you to backup and disaster-proof your data, especially in times of need. Find out more about their systems here: pstsonline.com.

Don’t try to be the best.

Think back to your favourite TED-Talk. Did they make a mistake or stumble over their words once or twice? You bet they did. We’re not robots (for now!) and fear of public speaking often stems from a deep fear of imperfection or rejection. It’s a guaranteed fact that no-one ever gets it perfect all the time, so how can you expect yourself to? Instead of striving toward the unachievable, take a breath, relax and be yourself. Trust that you know your subject and the audience is there to hear you speak knowledgeably about it.

Know your subject matter.

That being said, invest some time and make sure that you know your topic completely. Study books, lectures, anything you can get your hands on until the words become like second nature. Once you become completely confident on your chosen subject, there will be less room for nerves, after all, you may be the most authoritative in the room.

Are you planning a conference and feeling lost before you’ve even started? If organising isn’t one of your strengths, then you’ll need to check out our smart guide to conference planning that wins every time.

Let us talk you through everything from scheduling to invites in this short but effective guide.

Find Your People

It would be easy to work with your friends and colleagues you find fun and easy going but you need quality workers with you. Gather your team and set out the proposal as you see it. Assign roles and get those initial tasks assigned as soon as possible.

Get Tech

The last thing you need is everyone working on the same thing, in the dark, with no real clue what anyone else is doing so get completely up to date with a rocking event management system.

This is software that keeps everyone on track and helps you, as the manager, oversee the whole thing and tick off tasks as you go.

Dates

Have your team contact all your must-haves, or first tier, conference attendees and offer them three potential dates. Get the info back as soon as you can and narrow it down to two possibilities. Then you’ll be in a good position to source your conference facility. Go somewhere you know has a great reputation or somewhere that you have used before so you know you’re getting good value for money.

Once the conference is booked you’ll be able to send out all your invitations, including all the invitees who didn’t make it into the first tier.

Countdown

This is when the clock starts ticking and you, along with your team, need to get into the finer details. Take a look at what tech you’ll need to get started. This will probably include microphones, projectors and so on. You’ll also need to make sure that the wifi signal at the facility is strong and easily accessible for all your delegates.

Next, equally as important, are refreshments. Your delegates will need regular access to coffee, pastries and sandwiches to keep them going, so make sure you book sufficiently in advance with a caterer or use the conference facility’s on-site team. Remember to check on your list of delegates if there are any special dietary requirements.

On the day itself run through a checklist with your team and assign roles, ranging from welcoming delegates to overseeing the catering and being on hand for tech support. Make sure everyone knows where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to be doing. Distribute a list of mobile phone numbers so the answer to a question is only a call or text away, rather than chasing someone around the building.

You’re all set for a seamless conference thanks to your smart tech, smart planning and superb organisational skills. You’ll no doubt be called upon to organise many more conferences to come so make a note of your great team members and haul them back in when conference season comes round again.

In the digital age, entrepreneurially minded introverts are free to run their own business from home, from their favorite coffee shop or from pretty much anywhere else in the world. As we prepare for the rollout of 5G, it’s easier than ever for introverts to command online business empires and liaise with remote workers virtually anywhere in the world. If you dare to live the dream of running your very own business from the comfort of your own home, here are some boxes you’ll have to check…

Set clear working hours and stick to them

When you’re no longer constrained to an office building, you’re also no longer constrained to office hours. Nonetheless, it still behoves you to keep regular working hours every day. You don’t necessarily have to work a 9 to 5 (especially if you do business with countries and provinces with different time zones). You do, however, have to have a clear delineation between working hours and living hours. This will not only help you to remain mentally healthy, it will help you to remain productive as you avoid burning out. Speaking of which…

Plan breaks

It’s much harder to make time to take lunch and coffee breaks when you don’t have a boss to relieve you. When you’re on a roll, it can be hard to make time for yourself. Nonetheless, it can be more damaging for you in the long term if you don’t plan lunch, coffee and other rest breaks. Being able to put your brain on ice for a few minutes can work wonders for your productivity.

Invest in the right digital tools

Cost conscious entrepreneurs needn’t spend a fortune on high quality digital tools. There are lots of inexpensive (or even free) digital tools which will allow you to run every aspect of your operation from home. What’s more, since so many of today’s applications are completely cloud based, you can still run your business with aplomb when you go on holiday or if you need to take to the road. There’s a plethora of cloud based tools out there from bookkeeping software to word processing solutions and CRMs which are either completely free or eminently affordable. Take the time to find the right ones for you.

Take a little extra time to vet your employees if you won’t get to see them face to face

No matter how great you are at what you do, your business will rise or fall on the strength of the employees you choose to help you. Since you may not get the chance to meet them face to face you may not be able to rely so much on your gut instincts when it comes to recruiting, training and onboarding. Take extra care when choosing employees and check out our guide to choosing better staff.

With the right knowhow you can run a thriving enterprise in the place where you’re most comfortable!

It’s not the product or service that your business provides that’ll determine its success. It’s the people that are driving the company forward that’ll do that. If you have poor-quality staff on your team, then you’ll struggle to hit the heights that you’d like to reach. If, on the other hand, you have a staff of grade-A players, then you might find that you exceed your expectations. So how do you increase your chances of ending up in the latter position? By improving your hiring process. If that leads to excellent team members, you’ll end up with an excellent team. It’s that simple! Below, we take a look at how you can make this a reality.

Refine Your Ad

Your job advertisement is going to determine the quality of the people who are applying for the position. If you’ve got a long list of requirements — to the point where you sound demanding — then you’ll only get the bottom of the pile applicants. That’s not because they’re more drawn to those ads, but because the better candidates won’t bother applying. They know how good they are; they don’t want to prove everything. They want to work for companies who can take them places. Make sure you’re mentioning why your company will be good for the applicant!

Filtering Out

There’s such a thing as hiring fatigue. You can interview so many people, and, sooner or later, you’ll grow tired. It’s much better for your hiring process if you only meet with the people who really are quality candidates. Easier said than done? No. You just need to have a filtering system in place. For example, you could put all your potential candidates through a brief digital interview. The ones who impress you, you can then invite for a face to face meeting. It’ll help ensure that the only people who are making it to the latter interview rounds are people you want to have working for you.

Cultural Fit

The resume is, of course, important — but it shouldn’t be the only thing you look at. You could have an applicant with an impressive resume who would be the wrong employee for your business. Why? Because they’re not the right fit for your company culture. There’s more to an employee than what they’re capable of doing — they also need to believe in your ethos, work with other people, and so on.

Out of the Office

There’s only so much that you can learn about a person when you’re sat opposite them on your territory. That’s not necessarily the best side of them. In some cases, it will be the best side of them — they’re just really good at interviews. As well as the formal side of getting to know them on a professional level, it’s also worthwhile getting to know other sides of them, too. Look at mixing things up by meeting with them in the real world. You’ll get a good sense of who they are at heart when you have lunch or dinner.

On the market right now, there are a number of businesses that offer the exact same service that you do. That is why the competition is so tough, and could also be the reason that so many businesses right now are not seeing the level of profits that they hoped for. If this is the case for your business, then you need to think about dropping some of those extra pounds that you can no longer afford. In this article, we are going to suggest three ways that you can do this, so if you are interested, keep reading.

Quality Not Quantity

Sometimes business owners forget that it is all about the quality of your staff rather than the amount you have. It could be the case that two people who are exceptional at their job could do the same thing as twenty average employees. That is why you need to make sure that when you are hiring new people to come aboard your business, they are going to benefit the company in some way. If not, then you are just paying a salary that is getting you no closer to your overall goal of more customers.

If you know that you have too many average workers in your company, then you need to start getting rid of some of them. It is probable that they are just costing your business money without giving much back to it, and this is something that can’t be happening right now. We know that firing people is always going to be hard, but for the sake of your business, you need to be able to do this.

The Equipment You Need

Another mistake that businesses make is buying too much equipment that they do not need. Instead, try making a list of the things that you know your business needs to be able to provide the correct service to your customers, and then build on this if necessary. For example, if you are concerned about safety, then you might need a high-temperature camera that can keep an eye on boilers and other equipment making sure that everything is still safe. This is the kind of thing that you are going to need on top of all the basic requirements for your service, so keep items like this in mind when you are making that list.

Services You Could Do Without

Not every company needs the same services as others on the market, and yet they think they do. For example, you might not need an entire IT department in your company when you could outsource the issue when things start to go wrong. The same thing could be said if you have a human resources department. Outsourcing could save you a lot of money here as you are going to have to pay less money to entire departments of your business that are not contributing effectively overall.

We hope that you have found this article helpful, and now have some ideas that you can use to drop those extra pounds that your business can no longer afford.

Business owners have many responsibilities and it can seem as if new ones crop up all the time. For instance, many companies have become increasingly concerned with the environmental impact of their operations. In addition to obligations to their customers, employees and stakeholders, they also embrace an obligation to the planet and future generations. Along with the positive effect this business decision has on their sustainability efforts, it also may attract new customers and burnish their corporate reputation. This is why so many leaders have sought to create a green culture within their organizations.

Fortunately, doing so may actually be easier than it sounds. It also can offer significant benefits beyond the obvious ones already mentioned. Becoming eco-friendly can increase your profitability and competitiveness by reducing costs. For example, installing timers or motion detectors to turn off lights when they’re not in use cuts utility bills as well as energy consumption. When it’s time to replace the toner cartridges in printers or copiers, consider recycling or refilling them instead of tossing them. You may receive a discount on replacements as you keep waste out of landfills. Switching your computers and other office equipment to energy-saving mode when not in use is another sound strategy to ensure your operations don’t use more resources than absolutely necessary.

Being environmentally responsible is just one of your priorities as a business, but it’s one that can easily fit into your operations. For more tips about saving money through eco-friendly practices, see the accompanying infographic.
Author bio: Robert S. Miller is President of Earthwise Environmental. He is a Certified Water Technologist who founded Earthwise in 1995 to address the need for sustainability in a stale water treatment industry.