The Stress Management Secret No One Talks About

It's called the fake meeting, and it's more common than you think.


With the advent of shared office calendars, company-issued Blackberries and 24/7 contact, the novelty -- and bragging rights -- for having a chock-a-block, multi-coloured online diary soon fades away. The fact that your existence is now pretty much created and accounted for on a publicly accessed schedule becomes tyrannical. 


So how do you outwit Outlook? By making sure you block time off with a meeting, even if it's only with yourself. When I was starting my career, I thought this was heresy. Now that I've experienced 17-hour days packed entirely with meetings not of my own choosing, I learned 'tis better to have a controlling hand in the process.


Some useful questions to help you block off catch-up-with-yourself times:


When does your real Monday start? Does it start on Sunday afternoon with a quick browse of the emails that poured in over the weekend, or do things really kick off when you get into the office on Monday? If you're one of the former, a discreet 45-minute breather on Tuesday morning helps enormously.


What are the busiest days of your week? For some client-facing people, it's Friday afternoon when panicked customers who put off doing what they needed to do since Monday dump their troubles at the last minute. It may help then to block off an hour on Friday morning in preparation for the expected calls in the afternoon.


What time of the day least impacts your work? If your firefighting skills are most needed in the morning when chaos usually erupt, be a sport and block off time for yourself in the afternoon. Doing it when all hell breaks loose is very poor form.


Keep your fake meeting to an hour maximum. Any longer and you must ask yourself if a) you're overdue for a holiday or b) you've got an issue with work. Both definitely need to be addressed.

To use an analogy, if you've been the type who lets the phone battery run out before recharging, learn a new habit: Recharge as you go. The secret to managerial sanity is being the master of your diary. Never let your diary master you. 

How To Pack Light For A Business Trip

Real road warriors never check in luggage. It's fine for family holidays, pretty much verboten for business trips -- especially if you're traveling with colleagues.


Checking in luggage means everyone has to wait politely at the carousel for your suitcase when they could have been running off for the first client meeting. Those 45 minutes equate to delayed business and lost opportunities.


Given today's baggage handling mishaps and delayed connections, checking in luggage also means running the risk of sitting in your hotel room in a bathrobe while your bags turn up three days later. If they surface at all.


Finally, checking in a monstrous suitcase points out the obvious: that you're an inexperienced traveler.


So how does one take on the Hand-carry Only Challenge? With rigorous planning and allowing your inner control freak to rule. Some helpful hints:


Don't pack without an agenda. How many days will you be away, what time are the flights, what meetings and social events do you have on each day? Write them all down or type it out on Excel. This will guide your choice of clothes. Having a chart of what to wear is immensely helpful, especially during those jet lag-fogged mornings. I used to print out a copy and tape it to the closet door of my hotel room.


Start packing at least three nights ahead. Just throw in the clothes and items you think you'll need; don't worry about everything fitting into the bag.


The night before your trip, ruthlessly cull: Any item of clothing that can't be worn at least three times doesn't make it into the suitcase. With only one exception:


Bring one knockout dress that can be rolled up. Even if you don't have a dinner scheduled, these things tend to sneak up on you. There's nothing worse than being at a fancy restaurant with grateful hosts and you're the most underdressed. Have one dress that's made of jersey or similarly thin, rollable fabric. Diane Von Furstenberg's wrap dresses are brilliant because they don't need any ironing.


Use every bit of available space. Stuff jewelry, transformers and chargers into a clutch; socks and tights into shoes. Rolling up clothes also reduces air pockets.


Make toiletries do double duty. In a pinch, moisturiser can work as makeup remover; hairspray can work as gel. If you don't have travel sizes (hoard all the samples you get from Sephora or Bliss), decant all liquids into 100 ml/3 oz plastic containers. Squeeze air out of the bottles before snapping them shut to reduce the likelihood of spillage -- if they look a little warped you've done a good job. Place the ziplock bag in the outside pocket of your hand-carry so it's quick to grab for security. Pawing through your luggage for liquids is so not a good look.


Wear your heaviest clothes on the flight. Jeans, boots, coats eat up precious space in your hand-carry. Just wear them and shed layers as you go along.


Keep the bag light by making a rule and sticking to it. Whenever I travel with one cabin-friendly Samsonite, my rule is 'something in, something out': Anything I buy can only get into the suitcase if I throw out another item. Draconian? Not if you're taking the Eurostar from Paris to London at the height of summer. Or doing a quick transfer in Bangkok.

Still have space in your bag? Congratulations. I'd slip in two plastic coat hangers: one with shaped shoulders for tops and another with clips for trousers or skirts. Save on hotel pressing charges and weird laundry rules (some European hotels don't offer it on weekends) by steaming your clothes in the shower the minute you get in.

Slimy Self-Promotion: Closet Purge Part 2

About a week ago I was featured in Christina Binkley's excellent column, On Style, in the Wall Street Journal. I'm chucking out things in my closet that were useful to my former corporate self, and making room for stuff that I feel is more in keeping with my new life.

The reaction from the article was enormous: My pieces literally flew off the online rack. I'm planning a second eBay sale on Monday, the 25th of January and you can see all the new pieces at my Auctiva store, Mad About Manolo. I will be listing Donna Karan New York, Prada, Calvin Klein and more. I start all auctions at $19.95 -- some pieces have no reserve price. 

So if you're looking for the odd designer or indie piece, do visit Mad About Manolo on Monday. I have a monster photo shoot with Betsy the mannequin this weekend, and hopefully there will be a lot of stock for you to trawl through.

Walk Nicely And Carry Lots of Stationery: A Guest Post By Stacy Neier

"Correspond. Record. Scribe. Invite and announce. Personalize. Live. Behave."

While all of these terms perhaps chronicle my very behavior for this post, I confess: I wish I were pushing a fine tipped pen into the smoothest of white cotton paper instead of pounding out Times New Roman on the smoothest of white 13” Macbooks. 

Call me a modern traditionalist – I prefer avant garde vintage-ist – but as email communication continues to fill too many hours of all our days, I find myself defecting to a differentiated approach in nurturing relationships. And that's through a form of niceness that interferes dramatically with the current zeitgeist swing. 

I have committed to going against the eco-friendlier grain and instant communication mechanisms: I hand write at least five significant messages to colleagues a week. 

Call it snail mail. Accuse me of wasting paper. Give me an embossed set of cardstock, and my work week includes the instant niceness Outlook Web Access can’t quite offer.

Nice. Could such a deceptively simple term be more misrepresented in the business world or communication in general? 

My 2010 was jumpstarted by a book called ‘The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness’ by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval. (Note: the foreword is by Jay Leno, so we’ll see how his subscription to his personal ‘Power of Nice’ plays out in the coming late-night wars. Conan may need to pick up a copy.) 

After getting over my wonderment that this token was given to me by my sister as a Christmas gift, I dug in and read it in one afternoon. It was my anxiety that I am too nice, not the other way around, that motivated my fast-paced journey through all 119 pages. 

The authors state that “nice may be the toughest four-letter word you’ll ever encounter.” The phrases at the start of this post, credited to Greer Chicago, bring this interpretation into focus too: Civility is not a sign of weakness. 

Consider the very manner in which you divide and conquer the ebb and flow of your email inbox.  Can you envision the last time you began to compose an email consisting of the salutation “Dear” and then signed off without depending on your formatted signature block which now likely includes a link to every other social networking site on which you hold a profile? (Speaking of nice, it would be nice for WiseStamp to move beyond Mozilla.) 

When I see the word “Dear” included in an email introduction, I assume a potential vendor has captured my name, and a CRM system has kicked out stock email with “Stacy” peppered in just the right sentences. Transparent? Yes. Nice? Not to my inbox.

After clearing through third-party emails and responding back to messages which indeed demand quality attention, fatigue sets in. The people I had hoped to connect with proactively somehow fell to the last hours of the workday when these are the very contacts which should be prioritized first. 

It is then that I turn the nice volume up. I make a quick grab for personalized stationery and a blue Sharpie pen, and with just a few glides of penmanship, instant nice is created for those colleagues and partners who I value the most amongst all the clutter that is not going to disappear. Even if I send one such nice, proactive note per day, the instant recharge of energy received is palpable. 

If this slice of nice is just too much, try this: Go through your email inbox, and find that one message which threads down to the point where you have just responded “OK” to a colleague’s email response of “Thanks.” You know the kind of message: the one which screams to be left naked without the curved “responded to” arrow icon. 

One person knows the email screams to cease activity, but that Blackberry is just so easy to send one last volley. It is the email type that needed to stop but now leaves you pondering why the whole dialogue was not on IM, on the phone, or even just in person. 

Identify the sender of this unraveled dialogue, and send that person a hand-written “thank you” through interoffice mail or the appropriate snail mail channel. If you aren’t overly familiar with the contact, write the note on the back of your business card, and invite him or her to stay in touch.

And if you must take this act of nice a step further to reinforce your own commitment to nice and inspire others to behave as nicely, update your status.  Share the nice on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook … not because you want your network to see how nice you are but because you want more people to take on the toughness of nice. Consider:

Sent @aliciakan a thank you for her spirit of pay it forward: an amazing sushi lunch + ebay amazement are hard to come by! That is civility!

140 characters exactly. Nice.

***

Stacy Neier is a Chicago-based educator who sees the business world through research and fashion. That's her description by the way. She omitted the fact that she's also enviably smart, absolutely witty and has exquisite taste in clothes and shoes -- all traits I admire. So I'll say it for her: Stacy Neier is brilliant.

Two Questions That Can Change Your Life

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

There's No Crying In Baseball: Separating Emotions From Business

I met recruiter, career consultant and social entrepreneur Veronica Ludwig at one of my first tweetups and took to her in a nano-second. 

Successful, smart and confident, Veronica's also completely genuine and wickedly funny. When I started Things They Don't Teach You In Business School, I bludgeoned her into writing a guest-post for me. 

Despite being in a different city, running around like crazy and dropping her laptop, she managed to deliver the goods. Here she shares her thoughts on a phenomenon we can all relate to: Where's the line between personal and professional? And when do you know you've crossed it?

You can follow Veronica Ludwig on Twitter, and find more great advice from her at www.veronicaludwig.com.

*For the non-Americans reading this, 'there's no crying in baseball' is a famous line uttered by Tom Hanks in the movie 'A League Of Their Own'.

We’ve all experienced it at some point in our career.  And if you haven’t, you will:

  

• The dreadful business decision that was based on an emotional outburst. 
• The inner office affair that makes everyone uncomfortable.
• The co-worker that comes into your office to talk about her relationship problems.
• The family member you got the job for.
• The friend you made at work who talks about work at the bar.
• The friend you now work with who talks about the bar at work.

The scenarios can be endless and all of them, unfortunate. 

Why unfortunate? Mainly because these types of situations allow opportunities for additional stresses and frustrations that we otherwise would not have to deal with.  

The term strictly business is highly underrated and the more important relationship building is to success, the more that term is being faded out.  

It seems that many business professionals are finding it difficult to know where to draw the line between business and personal relationship building, and how to make a business decision separate from the emotions that go along with those relationships.  

As a recruiter and entrepreneur, I’ve literally had people come to me in tears sharing their frustrations regarding either a job search or their current employment situation. 

To me, this automatically places me in the friend category and I will no longer look at this person as a business colleague. How could I? How can I feel comfortable referring this person to a client when I’ve just seen a mental breakdown?  

Believe me, I’ve had mental breakdowns of my own and I’m fully aware that we all do at times. We are human and it’s natural to release emotions once in awhile.  But be careful who you are sharing these emotions with. 

Ever hear the term “never let ‘em see you sweat”?  It’s so true and very applicable when pertaining to your career.

Why is it that when we feel stress and frustration it often overflows into our professional lives?  Whether it’s stress from home or stress from the job, we should never allow it to affect our decision making process when it comes to business. And at all cost, we should never let it affect our professional relationships.  

There have been many instances where I’ve observed someone making an irrational decision either because they were having personal problems or they just didn’t like someone that they were working with. 

I’m not an expert in human behavior and I don’t claim to be. I will however, claim to know from experience that being aware of your actions and reactions in a business environment is key for continued success. 

Here is an example of my most recent experience with this ...

On an interview: A candidate explains their reason for leaving their last place of employment as an internal conflict with their supervisor. 

Whether it is the way the supervisor is running the department or a personal conflict, this should never be explained as the sole reason for leaving a company. It shows that the candidate does not deal well with conflict and makes a recruiter or hiring manager question his or her problem-solving abilities.  

Now, if this is the case, and you quit your job because you couldn’t stand your boss, talk about specifics of the business instead of your own personal issues and opinions. How were the department’s goals set and what did your team do to reach those goals? What could your team or department have done to reach a more positive outcome?  

Provide details if possible and discuss the steps you took to make the situation a better one. Address something positive that your supervisor did do to show that you appreciated and respected him or her as a professional. 

Discuss why you wanted to move on to further your own career and obtain a position that would allow you to execute your ideas for progression. No one needs to know that “your manager was intimidated by you and feared you would eventually take their position within the company”.  

This is information you share with your friends and family ... or keep to yourself.  Those personal opinions will only have a negative impact on your interview. 

My advice:

When you start feeling upset, frustrated, stressed, angry, sad, depressed, hopeless .... any negative emotion at all, immediately take a step back before acting on those emotions.  

If necessary, find a pen and write down why you think you feel that way and what you want to do about it. Look at what you just wrote. Set your emotions aside and really look at it. 

Does this make good business sense? 

What are the pros and cons of this decision and what exactly are you basing it on?  

If you’re basing it on your emotion or a personal experience, force yourself to re-evaluate the situation.  It could not only save your job, but also save your reputation as a respected professional.  

Always remember, there’s no crying in baseball.

Introverts: Five Secrets To Working A Room

Nothing creates heart palpitations for an introvert than the word 'networking'. I should know: I'm an introvert, an INTP in fact if you've taken the Myers-Briggs test.

Ironically I'm a marketer, which makes introversion a unique challenge Apart from hiring extroverts who could cover for me at my own functions, I've made my own cardinal rules for working a room without going bonkers:

Make it a game: Set a target before you go. It can be time (one hour maximum), number of strangers you meet/exchange cards with (10), number of tables visited (five). A target gives you something to focus on and accomplish. Once you're done with your target, merrily waltz off.

Ask lots of questions. In research speak, it's called open-ended questions. They're the ones that get strangers talking on and on about themselves instead of eliciting a simple yes or no. And if there's one universal truth, it's that people find themselves the most fascinating subject. One question I've found to be an all-time hit is "So what's keeping you busy these days?"

Give yourself regular breaks to recharge your batteries. Build these into your schedule, especially if you're at a day-long conference. Extroverts get their energy from other people; introverts draw energy from within themselves. Do it gracefully: If you're in mid-conversation with someone, just say 'It was lovely talking to you. I have to run off now to make a conference call, but I'll make sure to catch up with you later." Recharge in your hotel room, outside, or in a coffee shop. Then go back.

Look for the other introverts in the room. You'll know who they are because of that unmistakeable pained look on their faces. They'll be clutching their drinks and circling groups like blind bats. A good way to break the ice is "Looking for your friend too? I'm in the same boat."

If they're pinned to the wall or a seat like barnacles to a ship bottom and not furiously tapping away on their phone (a dead giveaway), smile and say "Thought I'd be cheeky and interrupt your moment of solitude there. My name's Jane." Shake hands. Start asking questions. They'll be relieved and grateful.

Treat this as a business exercise, not a popularity contest. This isn't high school. No one's rating your clothes, looks or technique. Get over it. Everyone's here for the same reason you are, and that's to build their knowledge, network and influence.

So go work the room with that higher purpose in mind. As an introvert you may never completely enjoy the exercise, but adopting these five tactics helps you rewrite your internal script -- networking is pointless, stupid and painful -- into one that not only enhances you professionally but is consistently you.

The Best Videos Are The Simplest Ones

Lost In The Air: The Jason Reitman Press Tour Simulator from Jason Reitman on Vimeo.

The Ugly Truth: Looks Do Matter

"Women who advance most at work, studies agree, are more attractive, thinner, taller and have a more youthful appearance than their female colleagues who are promoted less often." So says Forbes Woman. Read the entire piece here and tell us what you think: Do you need to be pretty to succeed?

Secrets To Delivering A Killer Presentation

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

View more presentations from Carmine Gallo.

How To Speak To 500 People And Survive

There are tons of books about combating fear of public speaking and lord knows I've bought all of them. But when it comes to speaking in front of 500 people, I've found the following tips and pointers -- from experience, fellow speakers and books -- to be of particular help:

1. Structure the speech with the knowledge that attention starts flagging around the fifth minute. At this critical point, an ironic comment or humorous visual is enough to get back the audience's attention.

2. Practice at every opportunity. Deliver the presentation while driving, styling your hair in the morning, getting ready for bed. Talk to your dog, the mirror, the curtains in your hotel room. Do it often enough that you can deliver it in your sleep.

Commit your presentation to heart so deeply that if your mind goes blank from fear once you climb that stage, your mouth will kick in instinctively and continue talking.

3. How you hear yourself and how others hear you is completely different, so get used to the sound of your voice. Record a message to yourself on your voice mail, and replay it no matter how it makes you cringe. Pay attention to your speed and intonation.

The tendency is to think you sound dreadful or have a pronounced accent when chances are listeners are not even registering these at all. You want to avoid that unpleasant 'God I sound like a braying donkey' thought crossing your mind which never fails to derail your concentration.

4. Check the venue, the audio-visual set-up and practice with their microphones, clickers and prompters.

5. Heed the advice of a voice teacher/therapist I know: Don't have alcohol or dairy 24 hours before you present. Drink lots of water. She also recommends Traditional Medicinals Organic Throat Coat tea. Steep two bags in a pot of hot water for at least half an hour and sip intermittently. You want your throat well lubricated.

6. Practice slow breathing 10 minutes before you go on. Inhale through your nose for four counts, filling your lungs with air. Exhale through your nose for four counts, emptying your lungs. Repeat several times. It helps reduce your voice shaking at the end of sentences.

7. The bigger the audience, the more people you're going to see nodding off, yawning, playing with their mobile phones, chatting with people beside them or getting up to go to the washroom. This is not evidence that you suck. It's human nature. You've done it too, even with the most fascinating speakers on stage. Just carry on.

8. If looking into people's eyes unnerves you, try looking at their foreheads. Or noses. Or at the door of the conference room.

9. A good speaker is sensitive to timing and atmosphere. If you're the last speaker, realise that the restlessness you're picking up is not unusual. You're the only one standing between the delegates and their dinner.

10. Accept that shit happens and laugh. Clickers can be maddeningly complex, slide transitions slow down or speed up, sound fails. Debacles happen to newbies and experts alike. On a 2008 book tour, writer and public speaker Scott Berkun quipped "Let's start 20 minutes late with gear that doesn't work."

And that's why he's one of the best: Being asked to address 500 people and other large audiences puts you in a different league, but knowing how to recover with grace and humour is the mark of a master.