If toucan, I can, we can, you can!

I remember being asked this by a TA Supervisor, during a conversation about being stuck and wanting to make progress. She looked at me and said: ‘What can you do?’

An easy question to ask and often an easy question to answer, because it’s not inviting us to change the world; instead we can look around us and find a simple step to take.

For example, I went up to London recently to see my publisher about the launch of How To Keep Your Job and before our meeting I went to The Guardian offices to have tea with a journalist friend.

Lacking a copy of the new book to take with me, when packing my bag, I looked round the office and spied a row of My Boss is a B@$T@*D parked on the shelf. Instead of saying to myself ‘I can’t take anything as I don’t have a copy of my new book’ I had a think and realised ‘I can take my first book’ …so I stuck a copy in my bag to hand over as a gift.

Last week my journalist chum emailed and asked for some PR copy as there’s a new film coming out called Horrible Bosses, which she wanted to use as a peg to write about dealing with poor managers. And in doing so give a large mention for my book.

How happy am I?

By asking myself the question ‘What can I do?’ I was able to do something positive (in taking an older book) that has generated some useful PR for me.

The article is due out on July 23rd in the Secrets Of… column.

And this week, if you’re grumbling, or getting stuck with something… stop complaining and instead ask:

‘What can I do?’

I wonder how many of the authors in this picture do something everyday to sell their book?

To be a successful author you have to both a) write your masterpiece and b) sell it.

This can come as a shock to a new author, as it did to me when I was first asked how I would be selling my own book. Me? Sell? Surely that’s the job of the publisher?

Alas not. Well, not quite.

Publishers are great at knowing the market, offering practical advice and turning a rough manuscript into a saleable product. And they’re busy people, constantly on the run from project to project, meeting new authors, commissioning work and travelling to book fairs and sales meetings. It’s not a bad life, but it is hectic and when they are presenting your book to a client it will probably be one of 30 and so they’ll have about 10 seconds or less to introduce it.

This means that the author has to shoulder a heavy sales burden and do much of the longer term spade work to make sure they sell books, once past the initial PR frenzy.

If you have a book* you wish to sell then here are my 5 top tips to get copies flying off the shelves:

1) Be nice to people on Twitter. Some selling is okay, as we all have to make a living, but 25 robo-tweets a day just irritates people. Less is more.

2) Use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to point people to your Amazon page. If you do a good job of 1) they’re more likely to trust you and have a browse.

3) Invite people to review your book. Or just to ’Like’ it. More traffic here does help to build trust.

4) Write another book. Nine years ago I was told that you need to publish (not just write) five books to consider yourself a fully-fledged author. There is wisdom to this, which is that publishers like to invest in author-brands and also the general public repeat-purchase books from authors they like. In combination these two facets help to sell books.

5) Do something everyday. Check your Amazon rating, write a PR piece, make a new friend, tell someone about your book, tweak your author biog…or anything else that grabs your fancy. So many people give up after three weeks, but the real pro’s keep at it for years. If you want the sales you have to put in the leg work.

Clearly this post has nothing to do with the fact that my exciting new book, called How To Keep Your Job, is available from 14th July in all good book shops, a few dodgy ones and of course (cue angelic chorus) Amazon.co.uk

It also has nothing to do with me needing to write up the submission for book five, which is due out this time in 2012.

…This post is just here to be helpful to writers everywhere.

*Or other products.

To be assertive - let your eyes do the work

I had to laugh a few days ago, when teaching ‘Assertiveness’ to a lovely group of delegates, because I needed to use my own techniques to assert myself and get through the material within time. Assertiveness doesn’t come from just being in the room; instead we have to choose how to use our energy to make ourselves heard.

Here are 5 ways that I used to assert myself:

1) Standing up. It’s much easier to project our voice and ‘be present’ when we have height to our advantage.

2) Pause button. Holding your hand out flat and saying ‘can I just pause you’ is a great way of getting control over the ‘conversation space’.

3) 3-beat eye contact. Holding someone’s gaze for a count of three is a powerful way to assert yourself as it projects confidence and sincerity, and the other person realises that what you’re saying is important to you.

4) Asking questions. If in doubt ask a question, as it encourages thinking and enables us to discover new information…and because there’s a chance that we may have mis-understood the other person’s position.

5) Holding the silence. Assertiveness can be about doing nothing, and in order to assert control; stillness has value. Simply ask for silence and stand with your arms out to one side, palms flat, and be still (a kind of double pause button). Your stillness will quieten others and give you control.

Assertiveness is easier when you know a trick or two and my sneaky point 6 is this: practice at home with your partner, or on the kids. It’s free and a great way to increase confidence.

And finally… A small flurry of excitement this week when Job Hunting 3.0 broke the 2,000 barrier on Amazon and reached a new high at number 1,860 in the charts, which is a fantastic result. Small sherries all round and big thank you’s to everyone who has bought a copy, or recommended it to friends.

It’s almost certainly the most practical job hunting book in the UK today and is as relevant for school leavers as it is for seasoned workers.

These are 'Lindenhof Lambs' from Canada. They make great wool, but rubbish business managers

I’ve had three contrasting situations this week which have reminded me that it’s easy to overlook difficult decisions, or to avoid difficult conversations.

Business is fun and yet it has it’s darker side too…where we have to take tough decisions and deal with tricky situations.

Facing up to reality is what separates the sheep from the lambs and we all have to do it sometimes.

Here are three little vignettes for you to consider:

1) I have downsized my car this week to a cheaper and more economical Volvo (which I’m very pleased with). Much as I loved my Audi, my driving patterns have changed and it felt like my business now had a Director sat there drinking my coffee and doing less work. The car had to go.

2) A colleague has an under-performing supervisor and has been keeping his fingers crossed that he’ll ‘improve soon’. So far he’s waited six months, to no avail. I suggested that his waiting was becoming part of the problem. He’s talking with the supervisor next week.

3) A friend who is out of her depth and needs support had been passive about creating sales meetings. Selling can be tough and scary and daunting, but if you can’t sell you probably shouldn’t be running your own business. The trick is to make it feel safe by taking small steps and only doing one scary thing at a time. Too much is overload. She now has a simple plan, that combines easy activities with a bit of personal stretch.

If you’re in business and have an elephant in the room, car on the drive, or member of staff under-performing what are you going do to about it?

The sheep are in business, whereas the lambs think they are, but in reality are just playing at it.

….If you’re worried then talk to someone and share your concens. Or give me a call and we can combine business problem solving with cake.

After all, tough talk can be tasty talk..!

It's colourful, but it's still a donkey...

Sometimes the smallest words can be the hardest to say and ‘No’ is certainly one of them.

This is because we often don’t wish to risk upsetting someone who’s asked us for something in good faith. So, instead of saying ‘No’ we say ‘Yes’. And then regret it.

Often we like to ‘please people’ and feel that a rejection would mean upsetting them, or letting then down, so we put our own needs to one side and help them out, even though we have our own work to do.

In some organisations people take advantage of the ‘nice people’ and get them to do work they shouldn’t be doing, or make sure they are the ones to make the tea and fetch the biscuits…knowing they’ll never say ‘No.’

The good news is that it’s easy to avoid saying ‘Yes’, once you know how to say ‘No’ in a more assertive way.

Instead of saying a bald ‘No’ – smile warmly and say:

1) Not yet
2) Not right now
3) Not at this time
4) Not in this way

…You can follow it up by saying, for example, ‘I’m free at 5pm if you’d like to go through it then?’

Often people don’t want to wait and so will find someone else to help them. Or even do it themselves, knowing their laziness has been rumbled.

Saying ‘Not yet’ isn’t going to cost you friends, and people will not stop liking you simply because you’re being assertive. These two little trip-wires are simply fantasies that we create in order to keep the world in a shape that we like.

The reality is that people will like us for being us…and not for being the tea donkey!

Don't try and mow the lawn...go and do something less boring instead!

I was chatting with a happy client last week who’d made in-roads into his long to-do list, after our previous coaching session.

Curious to know exactly what had caused the shift in his effectiveness, I asked what he was doing differently now?

‘Well, it’s quite simple really,’ he replied, ‘every time I find myself using the word try in my speech or in my thoughts I stop and ask myself if I’m really going to do the work? If I’m just picking at it, I stop the task and choose something else. That way I’m not wasting as much time and although I’m might not always be doing what I ‘should’ be doing, at least I am doing something productive.’

He had a point. We can often sit down and try to finish the task we’re supposed to be doing, but which secretly we’re bored with. In reality it’s often better to own up to our faffing, stop the task and change course.

Indeed I did this myself the other day, when trying to write some PR material. I tried really hard for a bit and then realised what I was doing (which was trying to write). So I stopped the trying and choose a different task (giving Crow’s plummage a brush after his dust bath) and got on with a decent slab of doing.

If we promise to try and mow the lawn, paint the fence, wash the car, clean the windows or take the dog for a walk, it’s a fair bet that none of these things will actually happen. And we’ve not broken our promise either because (due to a handy psychological insurance policy) we only committed to try and do these things and not to actually do them. A subtle difference, but the devil is in the detail.

For extra insurance cover we may have started them and then found a jolly good reason to stop and watch a bit of sport on the tellybox….the job clearly only ‘paused temporarily.’

Next time someone offers to try and do something…pause them and ask if they’re:

A) Going to try and do it?

B) Going to do it?

You’ll be amazed at how much more productive they are when they choose B).

Is your office as tidy as this?

I’ve been having a tidy up this weekend. In fact ‘tidy up’ doesn’t really do it justice, given that I’ve relocated my office office back into my home office, stripped the home office shelves bare, thrown away old documents and mobile phone cables, sorted out my archive in the loft, thrown away more old bits of tat and then re-populated the office shelves, so that they look clean and organised and purposeful.

There’s a bit of fine tuning to do, but I have to say that a Spring clean and general change around was well overdue. Ratty and Moley would be proud, and no doubt would whip up a sumptuous picnic to celebrate.

Out of all this dusty, yet rewarding, activity three lessons emerge…lessons which I’ve been reminding myself of this weekend. They are:

1. Nothing is forever. I’ve really enjoyed having a shared office space and now, having written two books there and sorted out my ILM accreditation, it’s time to move on. Change is good – I’m on the road a lot more again and don’t need to have two desks!

2. Build income streams before expenditure streams. I was debating whether to find another office space, when a colleague of mine pointed out that it’s easy to accumulate costs and that good business requires you to make money before you spend it. (How many people do you know who run their business the other way round?) So, I’ve moved my office rent budget for the year ahead into my marketing budget, which is a better use of resouces and frees me up to boost the spend on book four.

3. Be decisive. When you move: move. When you’re throwing things away: throw stuff away. It’s amazing how tempting it’s been to dither, or to hang on to bits of paper….yet if I’ve not touched it in 6 years, do I really need it? So, I’ve been decisive and have moved everything home, have been ruthless with the waste and have kept asking myself: ‘What am I keeping this for?’

It’s been a great weekend. And leaves me with three questions for you to think about this week:

1) Where could you make a big change to your business expenditure and reinvest the money into something more useful to you?

2) What do you need to be decisive about this week?

3) What are you keeping all that clutter for exactly…???

Have a good week. I’m off to nick some of Ratty’s potted ham, potted shrimp, jellied lobster, farmhouse cheese, cold chicken, cold tongue, cold pork, pickles, crusty loaf, biscuits, apple juice, scones, butter, strawberry jam and thick cream. He may be a fictional rat, but he does whip up dastardly delicious comestibles.

It's your business...so you can choose the filling!

The message in this post is simple: You need to delegate in order to grow.

Easy to say…but hard to achieve perhaps?

I was munching a cheesy toasted sandwich this week with my friend Julie from JobHop.co.uk which is a cool site for people who want to make a move with their career, or for employers who want to find people. I’m not an affiliate, but I like what she does so am happy to give you the link.

Anyway, we were talking about how to grow a business and she reminded me about the need to delegate – in fact what really struck me was that this is the second time this year I’ve heard the same phrase.

After I’d heard the words in January from Andie, one of my co-Directors at Centred Development, I decided to delegate a chunk of the PR work for Job Hunting 3.0. So, I rang my marketing colleague and delegated six writing tasks to him. He drafted the pieces and I polished them, instead of me thinking about drafting them. Progress was made and some of this work helped to propel the book up into the top 5,000 on Amazon, which has delighted the publisher. (Sub 10k gets you lunch, sub 5k gets you a knife and fork to eat it with).

Would this have been achieved without me delegating the work? Probably not…it would still be sitting on my list of things that ‘I will definitely get done tomorrow’. Or maybe the day after.

As you think about the week ahead, ask yourself what you need to delegate in order to grow a bit? I’ve been surprised how little bits of help all add up over time, so a good place to start is any simple task that you just never seem to get round to doing and which you need completed.

Remember: If you really want to grow your business, delegate tasks to people, so that you have more time to do those things which will take you forwards. These include selling, product development, marketing work, meeting contacts, networking and following up enquiries.

And if you have any brie-filled toasted sandwiches that need eating, you’re welcome to ask for my help…!

Helicopters are cool...get one!

I’m coming to the end of a long process because my fourth book is almost finished; the deadline being 1st March for the manuscript to be delivered, in order to meet a publication date of June/July 2011.

The title of this book is: HOW TO KEEP YOUR JOB

Catchy huh! …And the subtitle is: Brilliant ways to improve productivity, stay employed and keep the money rolling in.

Writing books is a long process because you have three main production stages before you get to the selling and marketing work. They are:

- Planning
- Writing
- Editing

There is also a fourth stage that tends to creep in and that’s called faffing. This is an essential part of the creative process and involves drinking extra cups of tea, tweeting instead of writing and generally gazing into space. However, by chewing a pencil at the same time it is possible to look lost in deep thought, instead of merely vacant (which is pretty much what is going on behind the curtains).

The other ingredient is stamina. Marathon runners only have to jog along for three or four hours and then the race is over. Writers have to keep going for hundreds of hours in order to get the words down on paper and then rearrange them so that they make some kind of sense.

There are no shortcuts if you want to write a book; you have to put in the time and keep pushing forwards.

As for me, this weekend I will notch up 30+ hours of editing and polishing, on top of the 60 hours or so I worked during the last 7 days. The end result will be worth it though, as the book is full of practical tips and useful models and, because it has my name on the cover, I need to make sure it’s a book to be proud of.

I know that you too will have worked hard this last week and therefore my point here is for us all to consider:

When I email the manuscript across to Marshall Cavendish my next task will be to click the ‘place your order’ button on Amazon and release into my clutches a nifty little remote control helicopter, as a well done to me for working so hard.

The book will take several weeks to line edit, type set and print, but the helicopter will be mine next week and it will be a top toy to keep my Child Ego State amused and repay him for missing his weekends in the sun.

Children need fun and playtime and just because we’re big hairy grown ups, doesn’t mean that we can ignore the little child inside us, who still needs to play and enjoy doing something just for the pleasure of it.

So, this week it’s toy time!

What will you be choosing for the small child inside you?

Here's a menu... what do you fancy for lunch?

One really simple way to get ourselves out and about and doing some useful networking is simply to do lunch. I mention this because recently I’ve had two lunches where I met business friends for a natter and with no set agenda.

Because we were relaxed we had friendly chats. And…and this is the key point here…in both cases I came away with new options for networking and for pursuing marketing activities.

It reminded me that often we don’t really know what our friends are doing and what other skills they have until we talk to them.

So, here’s my 4-step plan to get us started:

1. Pick a friend who is in similar situation to yourself, e.g. running their own business.

2. Invite them out to lunch, or to meet up for tea and cake.

3. Have a relaxed friendly chat and mention your frustrations.

4. Ask if they know of any solutions, or options for actions?

The key thing is that we need to be comfortable enough to reveal our frustrations. Doing this is a great way to move the conversation from gentle ‘pastiming’ into something more purposeful and ‘activity’ related.

Pastiming is a word from TA and it means a safe level of conversation where we risk little and get little in return. Activity, in a TA context, is when we move beyond platitudes and start to do some work. We risk more, by perhaps revealing concerns, but we get more in return.

So, if you’re wrestling with a problem, want to increase your networking activities, or are chewing the end of your pencil over an issue, then my suggestion is to stop. And to start doing lunch.

You never know how useful it might be and what new possibilities will open up for you.

Where could lunch take you?

This week it’s taking me out to dinner…for more networking with interesting people.