2011

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The psychology of quitting

Penelope Trunk

I am at a hotel. I think I'm dying. I have a bruise from where the Farmer slammed me into our bed post. I took the kids and went to a hotel so I could have time to think. I think I need to move into a hotel for a month. The Farmer told me that he will not beat me up any more if I do not make him stay up late talking to me. If you asked him why he is still being violent to me, he would tell you that I’m impossible to live with.

Medical 111
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How to Have a Positive Attitude at Work (While Still Being Yourself)

Eat Your Career

My former co-worker (let’s call her “Ruth”) always saw the negative in everything. When an idea was presented, she was the first one to say, “That won’t work.” Fair enough. But she never offered alternatives. She never looked for solutions. She never, ever gave anything or anyone the benefit of the doubt. Ruth was an absolute nightmare to work with.

Solution 111
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Competition Winners – and a Special Bonus Prize for You

Lateral Action

Thank you to everyone who entered the What Inspires You? competition by leaving comments on the original post about your inspirations. Fittingly, the comment thread turned out to be an inspiration in its own right, with over 100 entries that reminded me what a special group of people read this blog. We had such a […]. The post Competition Winners – and a Special Bonus Prize for You appeared first on Mark McGuinness | Creative Coach.

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When Knowledge Sharing Turns to Knowledge Hiding

Strategy+Business

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The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your Training Program

Learning how to promote your training courses online is key to growing your training business. In this Ultimate Guide to Marketing we cover effective and modern marketing strategies that will help you market your training program, and sell more courses. You’ll learn how to: Harness the power of SEO to drive website traffic Convert more website visitors to sales Create smart email marketing campaigns Get the most out of course marketplaces Establish a referral program And more… Get ready to see y

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Secret social skills successful people know

Penelope Trunk

When we were at LegoLand I was struck by the high emotional intelligence of the employees. Their job is to make everyone feel like their Lego project is great. (You'd be surprised how many parents are there, swiping the white blocks from little kids at the Lego snowman contest.). High emotional-intelligence jobs are very hard, and I would rather sweep floors.

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Investors fund mostly men, which is fine for women

Penelope Trunk

This post is cross-posted at TechCrunch. We need to get more guys who are running tech startups to decide instead to be stay-at-home dads. What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That’s what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups. If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying.

Banking 111

More Trending

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How to Ask Smart Questions

Penelope Trunk

This post is sponsored by the American Cancer Society. After I realized that the most underrated skill is asking good questions , I realized that I am not very good at it. I don’t ask for help enough because I don’t know what question to ask. And also, I worry the question will be bad and then the person won’t want to help me again. So I started forcing myself to ask for help.

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How Successful People Deal with Asperger's

Penelope Trunk

I get an incredible amount of email from people with Asperger Syndrome. It’s all really similar. Here’s a sample: “I’m 45 and a lawyer and I have Aspergers. I don't know what is appropriate, and not appropriate some of the time, such as talking too much about very personal info, or saying something that offends someone. “I've gone through many friends in life.

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Make Your Work More Meaningful

Penelope Trunk

This post is sponsored by the American Cancer Society. Take a look at Steve Martin's business card. I love it because it brings to light the lack of meaning we often feel during the daily routine of work life. When I was new to the workforce, I saw two ends of a spectrum. On one end, risking one's life to save dying children, and on the other end, hedge-fund banking to make millions.

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How to find a job you'll love

Penelope Trunk

My homeschool blog is mentioned in the New York Times. It's a small mention, but it's a big deal for me, because lately I've been obsessed with how people learn, and what makes a successful adult. It's appropriate that the Times would link the day I wrote about what my day is like trying to homeschool and work full-time. It's a colossal mess, really.

IT 112
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Next Level eLearning – The AI-powered Courseware Coach

Introducing Willow from WILL Interactive – a new artificial instructor technology that coaches users through eLearning content to increase training ROI. Using active conversations with a virtual expert not only reinforces key concepts but also helps employees think critically and creatively. Willow can ask questions, analyze responses, and deliver personalized feedback.

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What startup life is really like

Penelope Trunk

(This post was originally published on Venture Beat. This photo is by Melissa.). Brazen Careerist is my third startup. People ask me all the time why I gave up my position as CEO. If you knew what startup life was really like, you would ask me why I was CEO for as long as I was. When I started building the brand of Brazen Careerist around the year 2000, I talked about ideas like job hopping as a way to build a solid career, and I warned that generation Y’s entry into the workforce would be a tot

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Finance Tips for the Self-Employed

Penelope Trunk

This is probably what you think self-employed looks like: I'm at an amusement park with my kids, in the middle of the week, and I'm on a conference call while I watch my son try to get on a ride. Being self-employed looks so nice at an amusement park. The self-employed are always free to go on a vacation. They pick up their friends at the airport in the middle of the day, they show up for poker night because they can stay out late, and they can plan their wedding without having to pret

Finance 111
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How School Affects Future Earnings

Penelope Trunk

The best way to understand earning power—no matter what your age—is to understand the factors that go into it. For example, most people who have careers that are plateauing usually have a learning problem that manifests itself as an earning problem. And for parents, schooling discussions are really earning discussions. Because you can say that kids with a love of learning are lifelong learners ( essential for workplace success today ), but truly, who wants an unemployed Ph.D candidat

Mentor 111
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Resume Advice You Never Hear

Penelope Trunk

When I had my second son, I had a nervous breakdown. I’m not sure exactly what the cause was. But things were bad. I had a three-year-old with autism, a baby with a facial deformity that required a team of ten different types of doctors, and no family helping me, and I didn’t take maternity leave. This is what happened: I put a knife in my head. It’s a weird thing about the knife.

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Shaping a Better Future by Uniting Corporate and Higher Education Content

With the increased interest in reskilling and upskilling existing workforces, companies are looking for more training and development content and realizing that higher education has a lot to offer. Similarly, companies are finding value in providing training to students and preskilling their future workforce. The challenge is that the technology and platforms used to serve these two audiences have never had to work well together—until now.

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When It's OK to Take a Pay Cut

Penelope Trunk

The farmer is separating his farm from his parent's farm. To say this has been a summer full of drama would be a total understatement. I would say that the drama has gone from his larger family , to our little family , and now, to the economics of the farm. This is probably where the drama should be: The Farmer is essentially starting a new business.

IT 111
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Next Phase of Your Career: Design

Penelope Trunk

The future of the Internet is design: from fine art galleries to the size of the box you type in name. So start figuring out how to rejigger things to make your career relevant. Here's how I know what's coming: First, a flurry of emails arrive in my in-box each day touting “free infographics.” After sniffing around, I discovered that infographics garner so many clicks that SEO mavens publish quick, cheesy infographics to hand out for free in exchange for links back to publisher sites.

Career 111
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How to Know What to Look For

Penelope Trunk

We have a huge vegetable garden. While the Farmer was planting huge crops of corn and hay, I was planting twenty types of vegetables. I have not bought vegetables from the store since May, when the first lettuce was ripe. This is a picture of me digging through our forty tomato plants. When I was putting them in the ground, I never dreamed that forty would really grow.

Career 111
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Surviving 9/11: Ten years later

Penelope Trunk

During the year after 9/11 I went to counseling for post-traumatic stress. I went to a group that met weekly. The counselors explained that if we told our story over and over again, the story would have less power over us. So I have been telling my story for ten years. I am lucky to have a blog, and an amazing community to tell my story to. And recently, as the 10 th anniversary has been approaching, I’ve been telling my story again, to many news outlets.

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Mastering Remote Onboarding: Proven Strategies for Seamless New Hire Integration

Speaker: Tim Buteyn, President of ThinkingKap Learning Solutions

Join this brand new webinar with Tim Buteyn to learn how you can master the art of remote onboarding! By the end of this session, you'll understand how to: Craft a Tailored Onboarding Checklist 📝 Develop a comprehensive, customized checklist that ensures every new hire has a smooth transition into your company, no matter where they are in the world.

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Voices of the Defenders of Grad School. And me crushing them.

Penelope Trunk

It’s pretty well established that non-science degrees are not necessary for a job. In fact, the degrees cost you too much money , require too long of a commitment , and do not teach you the real-life skills they promise. Yet, I do tons of radio call-inshows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases.

Insurance 112
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What to do in college right now

Penelope Trunk

It used to be controversial to say that college is a rip off. At this point, I think the arguments have reached the mainstream. The problem is that, while some kids win the intellectual lottery , it’s too risky for most kids to skip out on the credentials. So the question is: how can you make the most of the fact that you are going to college at a time when most people think college does not prepare you for the next step in your life?

Media 111
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Career Ruin: Homeschooling

Penelope Trunk

When people tell me they want to stay home with their kids and they can’t afford it, I want to yell at them about how when I was trying to write freelance and take care of the kids I had a babysitter refuse to come to the house because we had no food in the house. We had no food in the house because we had no money. I bought food on a day to day basis.

Career 111
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Shortcuts to Common New Year's Resolutions

Penelope Trunk

One reason I have achieved so much in my own career is that I’ve taken shortcuts. For example, I played professional beach volleyball without learning how to play indoor sixes very well—I can really only play doubles, which is what people play on the sand. But it allowed me to skip a lot of years of indoor volleyball training and still play pro.

Retail 111
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Your Guide To Transitioning Into Product Management: Essentials For New PMs

Speaker: Leslie Grandy, Product Executive & Drew Weaver, Senior Program Manager

Are you considering a shift to product management or just starting your journey as a Product Manager? Join Leslie Grandy and Drew Weaver for an insightful webinar designed to help you seamlessly transition into this dynamic role. Whether you're looking to pivot your career or enhance your existing skills, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to succeed!

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Do this for your career right now: Start a company and sell it for a dollar.

Penelope Trunk

This is the column I wrote for BNET. Usually I keep my best ideas for my blog, but after I posted this on BNET I thought: Hold it! This is a great idea! Everyone should be doing this to make their career great. So here's the post. If you want to make yourself stand out as a top candidate for almost any job, try this approach: start a company and then sell it for nothing.

Career 111
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Best alternative to grad school

Penelope Trunk

After yesterday’s post , about how stupid grad school is, a lot of people asked, what is an alternative to grad school? This is a great question. I see this picture outside my window at least once a month. I have only a little idea of what's going on. Should I go to graduate school to figure it out? I could. I could get in. And it's clear that the next stage in my life will involve some sort of work related to farming.

Media 111
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How to compete with Generation Z

Penelope Trunk

I'm convinced that the biggest impact Generation Z will have on the workplace is in their schooling. They will be lifelong, self-learners, who take more personal responsibility for their ongoing education than any generation in history. I am not talking about graduate school here. I am talking about a more creative, independent way of learning that does not stop at college, but rather, picks up pace remarkably after college, when real experiential learning starts happening.

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Repulsion is part of diversity

Penelope Trunk

One thing I have learned from living on a farm is that you are not really experiencing diversity unless you are also experiencing repulsion. We each have lots of assumptions about what is right and wrong, how the world works, how people should act in a civilized community. When faced with true diversity – that is, diversity of experience — we have to allow our assumptions to be challenged.

Food 111
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HIA Technologies Turns a New Chapter in Professional Development and Training

HIA Technologies announces the launch of Qvio™️ - transforming video engagement with two-way interactivity. With Qvio viewers can ask questions and get instant answers from the content owner's Author-Controlled AI™️.

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Overcome the willpower myth

Penelope Trunk

This post is sponsored by Tempur-Pedic because we think you deserve to get your best night’s sleep every night. I've been reading a lot about willpower to find out how to get more. It turns out that we only have a very little bit, and we cannot be demanding it of ourselves all day long because that would exhaust our supply and make us nuts. Which is, of course, what I do.

IT 111
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Are you a trend spotter?

Penelope Trunk

Ten years ago, when I was pitching my book to publishers, one publisher leaned back in his chair and said, "I don't get it, she's never worked in Human Resources, she's not part of Generation Y, and we can't even figure out what her career is. So how is she qualified to give career advice to young people?" I got sweaty.

Media 111
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On Sunday my son sold his pig

Penelope Trunk

When the pig litters came in January, the Farmer helped my son pick out pigs for his 4H project. They picked four, because you never know, really, how a pig will grow. So you start with four and pick two after a few months. My son woke up every morning and fed his pigs, for six months. And after three months, he walked with the pigs, around in a circle, twice a day, to train the pig for the show.

IT 111
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Techniques for Looking Normal

Penelope Trunk

Last week was a board meeting for my company, Brazen Careerist. I used to hate the board meetings because there is so much to prepare beforehand, and if everything is not going great, then you have to really face that. 1. Hide your feelings if they are going to be trouble for someone. I am still a major shareholder in my company, but I do not work at the company day to day.

IT 111
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The Ultimate LMS Buyer’s Guide: Everything You Need to Know When Purchasing an LMS

Whether you’re shopping for your very first learning management system (LMS) or looking to upgrade, the process can be overwhelming. With so many vendor options, each with its own multitude of features and pricing structures, even the most seasoned educators, trainers, and business leaders can feel lost in a sea of choices! Finding the LMS that’s best suited for your organization requires a planned, strategic approach.