Jeff Cassman - Page 214 of 346 - General business related things Jeff Cassman cares about

4 Ways to Quickly Change the Future

The terrible thing about the future is its predictability.

Yesterday returns until you change the future today.

Lousy relationships will be disappointing tomorrow unless you treat people differently today.

Boring meetings will drag on if you lead meetings like you did yesterday.

4 ways to quickly change the future:

#1. Reject consistency.

Consistency is the enemy of change unless you consistently change things.

Repetition congeals the past.

Stopping is a beginning.

Stop:

Having the same conversations over and over.
Doing the same things and expecting different results.
Thinking the same way about situations that aren’t changing.
Asking the same questions.

#2. Act differently.

Someone said, “The future belongs to those who believe in their dreams.”

Dreaming is a source of frustration for those who refuse to change.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.” Uncertain attribution

The future is created now.

#3. Welcome new people into your life.

Invite people from other departments to attend your meetings.
Listen to children’s books.
Ask the clerk at the store for the secret to success.
Take a casual introduction to the next level. Have coffee, for example.

#4. Try one new thing today.

Tomorrow will be the same as today unless you do something differently today.

Exercise:

Create two columns on a sheet of paper. Make a list of everything you would love to change about your organization or team in the left column. In the right column list everything a new leader might do to produce those change.

Choose one small thing you can do today to change the future. Don’t ask permission. Don’t violate established policies. Don’t step into someone’s turf.

“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” Nobel Prize winner Dennis Gabor.

How can you change the future today?

Still curious:

10 Ways to Change the Future Today

Future-Back: How Leaders Create the Future Today

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5 Secrets to Working Relationships

I love the feeling of being seen and recognized when I show up at any place of business.

We frequent the local Rita’s Italian Ice which is run by a couple from India. Her English is passable. He smiles and nods a lot. But they both give us a look of recognition when we walk up to the window. It feels like they’re glad to see us.

They remember that we like long-handled spoons. Short-handled plastic spoons are monstrosities.

I like people who like me.

Build working relationships by liking people.

5 secrets to working relationships:

#1. Notice others:

Strong working relationships begin with noticing people.

I ask the owners of Rita’s about business and personal things. For example, I ask them what they do when the store closes for the winter. By the way, she works at Walmart.

#2. Notice things that matter to others:

I notice the weather. When it’s warm and sunny, I say, “Business is going to be good today!”

Compliment good work. We recently had landscaping done. I walked around complimenting good work.

Compliment good work, even when you’re paying for it.

#3. Be playful:

At Rita’s I compliment the owner’s summer shorts and give him a thumbs up.

#4. Be glad to see others.

When you’re glad to see others, it’s easier for them to feel happy to see you.

I often begin coaching calls by saying, “I’ve been looking forward to our conversation.” Or “It’s good to see you.”

Be genuine. Before coaching calls, I think about things I respect about the person I’m speaking with.

#5. Give what you enjoy receiving.

I enjoy feeling special.

What you give to others often returns to you. When you make people feel special, they are more likely to treat you special.

How do leaders build strong working relationships?

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How to Create a Free Business Email

Want to just get started? Click here to sign up for DreamHost and create your free business email today.

When you want to portray professionalism in your small business or organization’s digital footprint, having an email address that ends in Gmail.com is not the best way to do it.

Fortunately, when you already own a website domain, you have the ability to begin sending emails that come from JaneSmith@MyWidgetBusiness.com, rather than JaneSmith@Gmail.com.

Depending on the subscription tier you are using for your domain hosting, you perhaps can even create a business email address for free that uses your domain name.

We’ll discuss the best ways to create a free business email address through an email hosting provider, using DreamHost as our example.

The Top Email Hosting Providers to Create a Free Business Email

When you subscribe to an email hosting provider with a monthly charge, you are paying for email hosting for your business. However, you also potentially can receive a free business email address as part of certain domain hosting subscriptions. DreamHost, for example, offers both domain hosting and WordPress hosting options that include free business email management.

You can read our full reviews of each email hosting provider here.

3 Steps to Create a Free Business Email

Once you have your domain in place, creating your free business email address is a pretty easy process. We will be using a DreamHost account in our examples for building your free business email address, but you can use a number of different domain hosting clients to perform this process.

Sign Up for a Hosting Plan
Set Up Your Custom Business Email
Check Your Email

The Easy Parts of Creating a Free Business Email

The process of creating a free business email address itself doesn’t require…

How To Boost Your Mental Health In Only 10 Minutes

It boosts our ability to regulate our emotions, avoid temptations and control bad habits.

Just ten minutes of moderate-intensity exercise, like running, is enough to improve mental health, a study finds.

This amount of exercise is enough to boost blood flow to various areas of the bilateral prefrontal cortex.

These areas of the brain are important to how we feel and control our actions.

The study suggests that even this small amount of exercise boosts our ability to regulate our emotions, avoid temptations and control bad habits.

Professor Hideaki Soya, study co-author, said:

“Given the extent of executive control required in coordinating balance, movement, and propulsion during running, it is logical that there would be increased neuronal activation in the prefrontal cortex and that other functions in this region would benefit from this increase in brain resources.”

For the study 26 people were given tests of their mood and brain function before and after they did 10 minutes on a treadmill.

The results showed that people felt better after running,

Chorphaka Damrongthai, the study’s first author, said:

“This was supported by findings of coincident activations in the prefrontal cortical regions involved in mood regulation.”

Not only this, but their brains demonstrated improved performance in areas related to mood and inhibitory control.

Inhibitory control is people’s ability to stop themselves from temptations, such as eating unhealthy food or any other habits that might otherwise be difficult to avoid.

It is also involved in controlling unwanted thoughts and directing attention efficiently.

The mental benefits of exercise

Exercise has been linked to a huge range of mental benefits, including that it:

increases stress resilience,
reduces anxiety,
lowers the risk of dementia,
speeds up the mind,
fights depression,
consolidates long-term memory,
and much more…

→ Related: Exercise: 20 Mental Benefits Of Physical Activity

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Damrongthai et al., 2021).

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How to Become a Social Media Manager (Guide + Free Resume Template)

Social media managers are the people in charge of a brand or person’s social media presence. Over the last decade, the role has been growing in popularity and more and more businesses are realizing the value of hiring social media managers to professionally handle their image online.

The job of a social media manager requires a wide variety of skills. While it may be easy to post an image of a product to Facebook and Instagram, there’s a lot more that goes into creating and executing a social media strategy — content creation, image/video editing, PR, data analytics, audience research, and more.

In this article, we outline the responsibilities social media managers handle and the skills you need to become a social media manager.

What does a social media manager do?

The responsibilities of a social media manager varies widely depending on the size of the company they work at.

In smaller organizations, a social media manager might be a one-person content creation team, responsible for things like copywriting, graphic design, and photo and video editing. In larger businesses, social media managers may work with other people who have those skills.

But no matter the size of the team and amount of available resources, social media marketing managers have many responsibilities.

These responsibilities include:

Creating content calendars and publishing (or scheduling) content.
Writing creative briefs (to direct agencies and/or internal copywriters, designers, and editors).
Being the channel owner for all social media profiles (including deciding which content goes live on which account and knowing each channel’s best practices).
Creating campaigns for the business (e.g. awareness campaigns, product launches, contests, rebrands, etc.).
Creating content (taking photos, editing videos, writing copy, designing graphics, finding user-generated content, and contributing to editorial content).
Maintaining brand guidelines across all social channels and working with the team to make sure that brand messaging is consistent.
Community managing (i.e. responding to comments and feedback).
Social listening (including identifying marketing opportunities in real-time, monitoring social media hashtags and branded keywords, managing social media crises, and detecting brand safety issues).
Tracking content and campaign performance through analytics and engagement ratings.
Creating weekly or monthly reports and ad-hoc reports for marketing campaigns and sponsorships.
Generating promotional strategies, such as organic traffic, paid ads, and influencer marketing.
Mapping influencer marketing efforts (identifying and selecting influencers, engaging with influencers’ posts, and reposting content).
Assessing if a certain platform isn’t producing good ROI.

What does a day in the life of a social media manager look like?

You might have noticed in the previous section that social media managers have to create and manage a lot of content and campaigns, and the social media accounts themselves.

While social media is fluid and no two days are exactly the same, here’s what a typical day in the life of a social media manager looks like:

9 – 10 am: Check emails and…

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Get the Feedback You Need to Grow

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How to Encrypt Email

Want to just get started? Click here to sign up for DreamHost and start encrypting your email today.

As a small business, keeping your data secure is an ongoing battle, especially when you must send sensitive information via email.

When you want to make certain that an unintended person does not intercept this information, you can encrypt your email messages.

Use the following steps to encrypt your email, whether you are using an email hosting provider or you are sending messages from your hosting domain’s email address through Gmail.

The Top Email Hosting Providers to Encrypt Email

For small businesses and entrepreneurs, using an email hosting provider is a great way to create an email address with your own domain name in it. You may be able to encrypt the messages through your email host, or you can link your Gmail address to your email host and encrypt the messages through Gmail (if you are using Google Workspace).

You can read our full reviews of each email hosting provider here.

3 Steps to Encrypt Email

Even when using an email hosting provider, you can send messages through your Gmail account using your business domain’s email address by linking them together. We will focus on discussing how to encrypt email through Gmail for this reason, rather than explaining the encryption steps required for each individual email hosting provider.

The Easy Parts of Encrypting Email

We would not call the process of encrypting email particularly easy, as it requires multiple steps to make the process work. But it does offer quite a few benefits.

Assured protection: When you can send important information via an encrypted email, you can be certain that the information will not fall into the wrong hands. Once you work through the process of encrypting…

A Personality Trait That Reduces Dementia Risk – And One That Raises It (M)

People high in this trait are less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, which can be a precursor to dementia.

Self-disciplined and highly organised people are at a reduced risk of dementia.

These are both aspects of conscientiousness, one of the five major aspects of personality.

Conscientious people tend to be goal-directed and hard-working as well as responsible and organised.

People who are high in conscientiousness are less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, which can be a precursor to dementia, researchers have found.

In contrast, being emotionally unstable is linked to an increased risk of dementia.

Known as neuroticism, the personality trait is linked to anxiety and depression as well as a greater experience of negative emotions.

Dr Tomiko Yoneda, the study’s first author, said:

“Personality traits reflect relatively enduring patterns of thinking and behaving, which may cumulatively affect engagement in healthy and unhealthy behaviors and thought patterns across the lifespan.

The accumulation of lifelong experiences may then contribute to susceptibility of particular diseases or disorders, such as mild cognitive impairment, or contribute to individual differences in the ability to withstand age-related neurological changes.”

The study involved almost 2,000 people enrolled in the Rush Memory and Aging Project, a long-term study tracking older adults in Illinois.

The results showed that higher conscientiousness was linked to a lower risk of dementia and higher neuroticism was linked to an increased risk of dementia.

Dr Yoneda explained:

“Scoring approximately six more points on a conscientiousness scale ranging 0 to 48 was associated with a 22% decreased risk of transitioning from normal cognitive functioning to mild cognitive impairment.

Additionally, scoring approximately seven more points on a neuroticism scale of 0 to 48 was associated with a 12% increased risk of transition.”

Eighty-year-olds high in conscientiousness were likely to live around two years longer without cognitive impairment.

They were also more likely to recover to normal cognition after receiving a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment.

High neuroticism, though, was linked to a year less living without cognitive impairment.

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Yoneda et al., 2022).

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Marketing Ethics: Selling Doesn’t Have to Be Sleazy (5 Real Examples)

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Create Your Best Presentation: the 10 MiM Exercise

Ashley is a young woman with an impressive past of overcoming difficulties and circumstances. She’s been speaking on behalf of a well know youth organization and wants to transition to becoming a speaker in her own right.

She asked me how to make that shift.

There are a number of factors in becoming a successful speaker. Whether you speak as part of your job, part or full-time professionally or simply as a platform to share your ideas, it is essential to identify your most important messages.

I asked Ashley to reflect on the ten most important lessons she’s learned so far that would help her future audiences. From those ten messages, she could design the best keynote she is capable of at this point in her life.

The best presentations are driven by the most important messages the speaker wants to convey.

You can use this same technique when you design a presentation.

I often being with what I call “the never again speech.” I assume that most audiences will never hear me speak again (although I work hard for and have enjoyed many repeat clients over the years).

By assuming this is my only change to share my ideas with them, I identify what I know that can most help them with their present challenges and aspirations. If there’s not going to be a part two, I better be careful in choosing what I share.

There have been so many times that my original design for a presentation has morphed into something completely different. As I started to compare ideas I wanted to share (my needs) to ideas the audience most needed to hear (their needs), my presentation inevitably improved.

But to do that, you need to know your most important messages.

Keep a running list of your 10 MiM so you’ll always know what is most important to share with a child, team member of colleague. Over time what were once primary messages in your work might become secondary as you learn new things.

We all have learned much in our lives but few have mined the lessons.

Mark Sanborn is an award winning speaker and Leadership Expert in Residence at High Point University, the Premier Life Skills University. For more information about his work, visit www.marksanborn.com.

Author: Mark Sanborn

Mark holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association (NSA) and is a member of the Speaker Hall of Fame. He was recently honored with the Cavett Award, the highest honor the NSA bestows on its members, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the speaking profession. In 2020, Global Gurus named Mark the #5 Leadership Authority in the world.