if you tell yourself you can not do it, guess what you can’t do it.  But if you believe that you can then you will.  Now, this premise doesn’t mean that if you think you can run 20 miles in a minute that you can.  It means that if you have a growth mindset that you expose yourself to the possibilities rather than limit yourself with negativity.  Modern psychologist Carol Dweck researches growth mindset and is known for teaching that we can grow our brain to success.  Her study titled “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” has garnered a growing following for years.

But what is mindset? Simply put we become what we think.  If we think we can’t…we can’t.  According to Dweck, a mindset is an “inquiry into the power of both our conscious and subconscious beliefs and how changing even the simplest of such beliefs can create a profound impact on every aspect of our lives.”  It lies in the idea that how our conviction and principles concerning our abilities and potential can stimulate the way we behave or act thereby, predicting our success.

There are, however, two mindsets—fixed and growth.  A fixed mindset is deeply ingrained in our system. It goes with the assumption that a person’s character, intellect, and creative ability are given. This set of inherent features are fixed and can’t be changed.  A growth mindset, on the other hand, is one that can be nurtured like a flower waiting to bloom.  This mindset thrives on overcoming challenges and looks at failures as avenues for growth.  It thrives on hard work, resiliency, and efforts. These two mindsets convey a great deal of how we behave, how we dance around success and failure, and ultimately on how to create sustainable growth for the business.

 Managing Business Success

While a strong fixed business mindset is good, it can’t be denied a nurtured growth mindset is essential.  It’s needed more so in today’s constantly changing and competitive markets.   Entrepreneurs and career professionals can no longer rely on our team’s skill set and must also incorporate a growth mindset that allows you to identify your path to business success.

It’s important to understand that relying on a fixed mindset alone will make challenges, more challenging.   An active growth mindset allows your internal monologue to identify new avenues and innovative direction.  It creates an opportunity to see the bigger picture and plan sustainable success rather than being limited by a fixed belief system.   Growth mindset allows you to constantly look for ways to grow and effectively manage challenges.  In short, it allows you to think outside the box while growing and learning.

Science tells us that by virtue of neuroplasticity, our brain does changes no matter how old we become.  So the good news is the opportunity to change is consistently available.  The key is being open to a new way of thinking and train your mind to build new skills.  Find your developing path and plan to stay ahead of the competitive curve.

Professional coaches will assist you as you create your new way of thinking.  According to experts like SiMar’s founder, Allison Todd, one must first recognize their way of thinking in an effort to realize a new way of thinking.  The growth mindset is a commitment to self and essential to the success process.  It’s important to tune out the negative internal monologue of a fixed mindset.  Identify ways to process the stumbling blocks of business.  Create a constant path of progress toward your business prospers.  And whatever you do, don’t ever give up.  Remember, the way you shape-up your mind has a huge impact on the way you manage your business.

If you believe your mindset is getting in the way of your progress, SiMar coaches are here to assist you.  Schedule a conversation with us today and let’s uncover the path to your new success.

Interpersonal skills are often referred to as people kills or social skills. Sometimes, they are pointed directly as communication skills. In general terms, they are also called life skills and fall under the category of “soft skills.” Unless you have developed anthropophobia or social phobia growing up, you actually possess innate interpersonal skills from the time you were born.

Yes, you had it in you all along. Interpersonal skills include verbal and non-verbal communication, listening skills, negotiation skills, problem solving and decision-making, and your level of assertiveness. What you say, how you say it, and how you interpret the message using both verbal and body language largely comprises the communication skills set of interpersonal skills. How you act upon challenges, find a win-win solution, and decide according to the opportunities presented as well as how you assert a stand also fall in the broad concept of interpersonal skills. All these, however, are crucial to your productiveness and effectiveness in the workforce.

While there are a broad range of skills set for you to be successful in your chosen field, it cannot be denied that having strong interpersonal skills will serve as a foundation for your success. Experts continually prove that without such, developing other life skills may be difficult.

Luckily, interpersonal skills can be honed to cohesively work with your hard skills. Here are some ways to develop them:

Indeed, developing strong personal skills can be a challenge. You need to recognize and accept your limitations and mistakes to fully grasp how far you can achieve. Maintain a positive attitude and, if possible, find a trusted coach who can guide you through.

Millennial workers can do a lot of good as well as harm to a product, service or brand even when not directly involved in the company’s social marketing team. They can also make a lot of difference with their personal tweets, updates, and posts related to the business. This is where you must find ways to create an internal campaign that points to this untapped leverage for your brand. By doing it right, you can guarantee creating an astounding social media presence that will create wave upon wave of success for your brand.

Social media solutions like all other marketing strategies for your brand require some deep thinking, planning, and practice. Content production, for instance, requires certain level of research to know precisely how to position a message. In the hopes of bringing utmost effectiveness to your campaign, training and guidance for your millennial workforce are essential factors to ensure that a clear-cut, unique and consistent brand voice be heard.

Without a doubt, your brand identity had been through a lot of successes and failures over the years. That somehow makes it easier to establish the right voice for your brand. For startups and businesses that wish to carve a new identity in the market, however, such concept may not be the case. The need to establish the right voice is crucial for them to make their social media presence felt and reverberated.

To develop such a challenging feat, certain aspects must be considered. One is to carefully identify what the company and its products or services truly stand for. Do you have a unique sales or service philosophy that differs from the rest? Methods of communication between customers or clients and the company must also be identified. So are your goals and objectives as well as expectations. Most importantly, it is also imperative to delineate what benefits customers are to enjoy from your brand.

Creating a solid brand voice must be infused along with these tenets. While a millennial workforce may have great advantage in utilizing social media, only by knowing what and how you want the brand to be perceived by your target audience or prospects will mark the difference.

The efforts in building a solid voice does not stop in generating a solid voice for your brand though. It requires a certain level of commitment to deliver something in a consistent manner. One challenge to this is the perceived unpredictability of millennials when it comes to marketing. Finding a way to ensure that they effectively infuse their individual personalities into the brand’s voice without restraining their creativity as well as enthusiasm will be of great help in creating a consistent brand voice. Add to that the real-time feedback of customers to make things go full circle.

All in all, gearing your millennial workforce with the right knowledge and unwavering loyalty will help amplify your brand’s social media leverage. Engage them. Train them to become brand ambassadors for your business. With their creativity and zeal for achievement– and social media savvy, you can finally guarantee delivering a brand voice that will echo the nucleus of your brand.

Fortunately, there are ways for you to make any crisis situation work to your advantage. You can also practice it to perfection. To get you started, here are some points to consider:

1. Take a pause and do nothing. Do not panic either. While it is noble to immediately act and rectify the problem, some womenpreneurs tend to be taken by their emotions in a roller coaster ride leading to horrendous results. So before you jump into the situation, try to take a step back, compose yourself, and see the problem from the outside looking in. This will help give you a better perspective and respond in a more effective and productive manner.

2. Consider consulting a reliable crisis management team for tough situations. This is even more so in situations that directly impact community or environmental standards. These firms know precisely what buttons to push and when to do it.

3. Confer with your own team particularly on internal issues or crisis situations involving product, service or brand. Do acknowledge that you cannot do everything in your lonesome. At this point, you will need everyone’s cooperation and ideas. As a rule of thumb, playing the blame-game will get your efforts nowhere. So, seek out your team’s help and find solutions instead of adding more to the problem.

4.  After weighing everything, it is time to pursue your planned course of action. Be proactive when managing a game-plan though. Always have contingencies in place. Make sure also to create identifiable measures to help monitor if the executed plan is effective or not.

5. Assess carefully the root cause of the problem, how it got blown out of proportion, and how it was being handled. Look at possible gaps in the measures being done. Through careful evaluation, you can prevent such crisis situation from recurring or device certain policies that could mitigate matters before they get worst.

6. Always maintain a positive mindset. Most womenpreneurs tend to consider a “worst case scenario” which is a good thing but not during a crisis situation. See mistakes and fiasco’s as avenues for improvement. Always believe that in every mistake lies the learning of how to do it right the next time around.

Indeed, there will always come a time for a crisis to crop up in a business. No matter how big or small, it is imperative to craft a robust crisis management system. In doing so, you can simply expect the unexpected and formulate solution to mitigate, if not eliminate, the issue at hand.

There are so many definitions about self-esteem. Sense of worth, confidence, and self-respect are just some of those listed in online dictionaries. It is basically that inner monologue telling you if you are good enough to achieve something or if you can actually do it. It is how one values himself. It is your own assessment on who you are and what you’re capable of. In most cases, however, your thoughts get askew with other people’s perception and treatment.

It is important to note that self-esteem runs parallel with talent or genius or expertise. You can be good in so many things but still have low regard for yourself. On the other spectrum, there are also people who, amid their lack of ability or talent, can project strong self-esteem. With this, it is logical to see that having low regards of oneself will impact directly one’s decision-making capabilities and behavior in general.

There are many ways to boost one’s dwindling self-esteem. But before that, it is essential to recognize some of its likely causes. Do you have issues with your talent and capacity? Have you encountered a life-changing failure or a series of poorly made decision that made you question your capabilities? Do you have acquired habits that continually erode your sense of self-respect? Are there people around you who made you feel inadequate?

Recognizing that you have a self-esteem problem and identifying some of its likely causes will make it easier for you to address them. While everybody is different, there are certain ground rules which anyone can apply:

But while self-help may be effective to others, developing a robust self-esteem can vary from situation to situation and from person to person. Some people can take themselves from a rut and improve their confidence level without seeking out outside help. Others, however, take refuge from the assistance of friends, colleagues, a mentor or a coach. Whichever way it maybe, it is imperative to address low self-esteem to prevent dilemmas from cropping up in business and in life in general.

Regardless of what you have in mind, it is known fact that your life’s strongest pursuit is that of the realization of your dreams. Your focus is to ensure that you land that dream job or get a promotion, or be successful with your startup business, or simply have a happy family, raise equally successful kids, or be a model citizen in the community. Each one of you is beholden to such challenges. The part when you start to work on the achievement of such goals, however, must start somewhere.

While motivation, personal goals and success are directly correlated, it is imperative to draw out your personal goals before everything. These goals will become your focus to motivate yourself to succeed. Setting personal goals is like turning on a car’s ignition. Motivation, on the other hand, is your way of driving continually and to go through every bump and puddle to ultimately arrive at success, your destination. By correlating these three aspects, you can guarantee facing life’s many challenges without flinching or backtracking.

Personal goals can come in many forms.  It could be academic, career, monetary, physical, creative, or ethical. These goals collectively point to your own domestic goals or how you wish to live life in the future. These personal goals come with two important perspectives—motivation and continuing direction.

To be useful however, experts suggested making your goal-setting SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timed. You need to know exactly what you want to be able to find ways to achieve them. To make sure that you can assess your progress, you need to set certain metrics. Of course, it must be realistic, relevant, and attainable—and to be more effective, a timeline must be set for the achievement of such goals.

But just because you create SMART goals then, that should be enough is a totally erroneous mindset. The world is also moving as you trudge in the realization of those goals. With this, you need to assess and re-assess your personal goals every step of the way. You need to check if such goals are still relevant or if you are still on the right track. In some cases, what you felt was of utmost importance before could no longer be as relevant due to sudden shifts in your life, job or business. If there is a need to rehash, improve or completely change them, then do so.

Goals must be solid enough to be able to move you, stimulate you to carry on, excite you. When these three concepts – goals, motivation and success—are properly aligned, you are definitely on the way for greatness.

To ensure that you get to easily move from one job to another, you need to have versatile or adaptable skills set. This particular skills set should not only be focused on one career path but must be broad-spectrum in a sense that it can fit to most, if not all, employment sectors. Employers are looking for people who have “employ-ability” skills or skills set that can fit to various job roles. So, what are these skills?

Communication Skills. Be prepared to have both excellent written and oral skills. Your own resume and its cover letter will deliver the “first impression” on your written capabilities while your interview will sound off that of your oral skills. Make sure to demonstrate articulateness when speaking while writing succinctly and with clarity. Employers look for these as it helps to carve a growth mindset, creativity, and aptitude.

Interpersonal Skills. Unless it’s a one-person mission to the moon, you will most definitely be working with co-employees, customers and clients, bosses, and so on. This is why the need to have good interpersonal skills is essential. This allows you to effectively partake as a team member, negotiate, and make good decisions. It also helps in satisfying client expectations as well as customer satisfaction. Excellent interpersonal skills usually stimulate empathetic listening leading to ease in building rapport with everyone.

Critical Thinking. Employers will also be on the lookout for your problem-solving and decision-making skills. Critical thinking is the ability to gather and evaluate relevant information—and the eye to pick the best solution. Along these lines, people with good critical thinking skills are also known to be effective in terms of planning, organizing, and getting things done efficiently.

Leadership Skills. While many believe that leadership skills are mainly focused for managerial or supervisory positions, this one is virtually being deemed essential on all new hires. This ability is about influencing others to achieve goals. Often, self-confidence is the best gauge being looked at by employers.

Computer Skills. This is the information age when everything is driven by technology and the Internet. Aside from knowing basic computer skills, some employers also look for specific requirements like ability to use apps, e-mail platform, social media, or programs related to their operation will be sought out.

Creative Skills. Bring your innovative and inventive mindset when applying for a new job. This skills are no longer just limited to marketing and designing but in many aspects. Finding new ways and means to make systems and procedures more effective and efficient has always been a target of businesses.

Numeracy-Presentation Skills. These two skills set are often interrelated. Presentation often require the ability to understand certain data like statistics, surveys, graphs, demographics, and other aspects essential to decision-making and reasoning. Numeracy skills can also become irrelevant if presentation skills are lacking.

While these skills sets are often on the table for employers and headhunters to consider, it is also important to develop positive attitude towards people, work, and the company you wish to work for. Expertise may be required in some aspects particularly in highly technical jobs but, all in all, employers will always choose someone who is willing to develop, learn and grow with the company.

In all these, it is important to note that keeping your employees well and healthy guarantees more productive results. Employees who are well-protected often deliver more benefits to the company. So whether you offer a group coverage or push for personal healthcare plans with add-on compensation, knowing that your wards are covered definitely means good business.

When going on a job interview, it is important to make employers judge you accurately. You would also want them to lean on your best side. Start on the right foot and ensure that it lasts long before the interview is over with these pointers:

1. Signify your objectives and set your goal clearly. Before going to an interview, it is imperative that you know precisely what you want. This will help ready your system to whatever will be thrown your way. Knowing that you want to be hired will maintain your focus to getting the job leading you to channel all the positive energy within.

2. Consider your overall visual impact. Yes, people rely mostly on their sense of sight for that nanosecond of judgment. Dress appropriately for the occasion. Make-up and hairdo must not be too stiff and not too all-over-the-place. So are your choices of jewelry. Be reminded also that wearing a watch is a must. It gives the impression of being prompt and “dedicated”. Some people seek out the help of a fashion coach in this regard.

3. Your nonverbal cues will take some 40 percent of the overall first impression. The way you carry yourself in a conversation, your mannerisms, hand gestures when you talk, the way you smile or laugh—these are all taken into account. Practice in front of a mirror. Shoot a practice interview with a friend or partner and review the video footage. Or you may also seek out the help of coach to hone your communication skills both verbal and body language.

4. Practice the essence of positivity. Days can easily turn from bad to worst. At some point, you may feel bad mood, anxiety or fear creeping under your clammy skin as you prepare for an interview. Find a corner and do a short meditative technique. It is called optimism. When your mind is free from all the burden of negativity, it will shine brightly into your eyes, your smile and words.

5. Be sincere. No matter how you feign interest or make yourself interesting, if the virtue of sincerity is not there, you are wasting your time. Make your approach genuine. Do not be afraid to ask questions. Clarify points not clear to you. An interviewer or employer always appreciates conversations built upon mutual curiosity.

Building lasting impression during job-seeking can be quite challenging. You need to be at the best of your game. So, try to assess yourself, draw out your strength, and turn your weakness as an advantage. Remember, you only get that one shot—make sure to make it count.

This only means that your online presence speaks volume about your brand. Your website to your social media profiles, status messages, tweets, pictures, articles, and other stuffs posted online is a reflection of what your business represents, and its culture. While the Internet revolutionizes various aspects of business, this makes branding management even more challenging and arduous in this day and age. To give you competitive advantage, here are some ways to manage your brand without fail:

1. Begin brand-building with your profile in mind. Make your company profile—from account name to photo to cover image—deliver the very imagery that represents who you are, what you stand for, and what you wish to achieve. Be straight to the point in the “About” section. Let your brand ambassadors like employees handling customer service or admin of the page mirror the values of your brand.

2. Steer clear of controversial brand ambassadors. Yes, in this day and age when information overload is notoriously easy, the use of questionable entities will cause more harm than good to your business image. Whether employees or endorsers, it is important to ensure that impression given out must be always on the positive.

3. Policies must be in place particularly in the use of apps. This is to protect private and sensitive information of the business. Part of the policy must be proper venue of the download, data protection, and so on. If you may, consider blocking of free apps to prevent leakage of critical information.

4. Gear your digital team against online trolling. Cyber-bullying is also notorious online striking both individual and business pages. One wrong tweet, like political or sensational topic, can easily blow out of proportion leading to heavy trolling or posting of offensive comments. Do make sure appropriate action plan is in place to handle such situations.

5. Set clear social media guidelines for your team. This will help give your employees or brand ambassadors a clear mandate on what photos, posts, links, and messages to post. It will also help create standard form of replying to comments or reacting to negative comments. Make sure to discuss each item at length with your team to prevent double standards.

6. Be relevant and effective. Share content which are not only significant to your brand but also those that are timely. Keep social media profiles up-to-date and in-sync, too.

7. In everything else, be consistent. In the world of brand building and management, consistency is still the key to gaining the respect of online audience. It also helps to draw in more followers when you give up to date information, organize contests, give freebies, beta testers, and so on.

With the rate this whole Internet and tech-gadget dependency is going, your online reputation definitely precedes the overall aspects of your business. Keep your audience enthralled. Poke on their excitement and curiosity. By keeping them engaged, you may also turn them into your own set of brand ambassadors, like reliable word-of-mouth campaigners on the digital level.