Learn to Leverage

If you are working in a large multi-national company chances are you will have to deal with contract staffs. There is a new belief that your permenant staff colleagues are your enemies and your contractors are your friends. Why? It seems that these days, the so-called permenant staff's job is to do coordination and management only. Management for them are mainly managing the bosses' expectation. The actual job is mostly done by the contractors.

This is not new phenomena but it is becoming more evident recently. Many large companies do not want to hire permenant staff so that they do not have to fire people often. This has lead to a new strategy that office workers must adopt in order to survive. The skill to develop is to be able to manage upwards and be good to the contractors so that they will do the work for you.

If you have not acquired this skill, you better start looking into it. With such skills, you will be able to move smoothly in your career and make lots of money. You can call this Leverage. Since you are not into business, you can't do the leverage that businessman do. You can still apply the same theory as a salaried man (woman).

Survival Skill #22: Manage upwards and Leverage downwards

Symptoms of Career Crisis

If you have been working for over 10 years and hardly taken any vacations or long breaks to reflect on your future, it might be good that you find an opportunity to do so. It need not be an expensive vacation. Just take your mind off your current job and reflect upon yourself. There are some important things you want to know about yourself and sometimes you do not have the opportunity to do so because you are so engrossed into your job. By the way, someone said that the word "JOB" stands for "Just-Over-Broke". It is not my intention to argue about that because there are people who made millions on their "JOB".

Some of the things you want to look out for in your mid career are symptons of crisis. Here are some of them:

1. Motivation - Are you motivated to do your job? If you are not, that is a negative point.
2. Negativity - You are always not confident that your companies program will work.
3. Interest Level - You don't feel excited about the job assignments. It is boring. But you just do it anyway.
4. Initiative - You never try to think of anything to improve your job. Just wait for instructions.
5. Concentration - You can't concentrate. You always think about other things and always forget to do something.
6. You get tired easily.
7. You dragged yourself to work. Always late. You try to find excuses to absent from work.
   
8. You are very sensitive to rumours. You are always trying to find out more about gossips.
9. You avoid seeing your clients, business partners, suppliers. You don't join your colleagues for lunch etc.
   

If you have more than 5 of any of the above symptoms, you may want to re-think carefully what exactly you want to do. If you really think that your current work place is not right for you, you really need to start to be more active to get in touch with recruitment agencies (secretly). You may also want to actively acquire the skills and knowledge for your next job. Pro-actively preparing your resume and set at least one-hour per day at home to search newspapers or Internet for job openings. Be more active to contact any friends you know and indirectly testing the market. It is easier to switch when you are still holding on to a job.

There is no point to hang around if you have lose interest.

Survival Skill #21: Always Seek Out New Opportunities

Life Long Learning - inch-by-inch

The theory of becoming rich quickly is to be able to leverage on something that
generates income. That has been said thousands times or millions times. But,
how do you actually do it? Best Seller author can give you hundreds of
examples. All these are nothing more than hindsight. But, wait a minute... I am
not saying they are wrong. They are absolutely right and I agree with them
totally. What I am driving at is that knowing the facts is not enough.
Developing the skill to do it is the key.

That leads to the theory of life long learning. Knowingly or unknowingly, we
are learning everyday. Sometimes we learn things subconsciously. That is bad
because we may learn things that are bad for us! Don't you think so? In my
opinion, we must be more self conscious of what we learn everyday. One
suggestion is to have 10-15 minutes every night before you close your eyes to
sleep, reflect on what you have learned during the day. Make a decision to do
better tomorrow. Inch-by-inch, we will get closer to acquiring the skill we
want. Whether it is for making lots of money or becoming a better person to our
family, friends, the society and the world as a whole.

Survival Skill #20: Self Reflection

Surviving the Challenging Time

This is a very busy holiday for me. Juggling 2 jobs is certainly not easy, not
to mention 3. While trying to build an Internet based business for my long term
future, I have a day job and another adhoc part-time "business".

I am trying to complete the day job, a project, as soon as possible because it
is a full-time assignment and takes about 11-12 hours (minimum) of my day time
everyday. That actually does not leave with much time for other things. After
spending another 1-2 hours of the time for other chores and children, there is
only about 2 hours left for my other businesses.

Weekend and public holidays are extremely precious for me. This is the time to
catch up with my other businesses. Weekends however, is not totally available
for me. I still have to spend time to bring my children to ballet class, music
class and art classes. Apart from that, I will have to spend some time with
them. That actually leaves quite little time for me.

My current day job is a project that brings me my bread and butter. I am
grateful to my friend who engaged me into his customer. Having tough time
juggling many things, I am very tempted to give up the day job. But, for the
sake of the income and my commitment to my friend, I soldier on. The reason
that I wanted to give up the day job is basically that this is not a long term
solution. It is a stop-gap solution with no future. I believe the long term
future for me is to be able to build a successful Internet Based business. But
my commitment to my friend will not allow me to give up. I intend to finished
the first phase that I promised and complete the delivery. As fot he second
phase, I am still thinking about it.

I considered myself very lucky that I have many choices in front of me. Even
though I may not be making lots of money, I think I can keep myself fully
occupied and be able to build something for the future.

Now, I just need to concentrate on what I am doing and get it done. In summary,
I need to invoke the Concentration Power to survive this stage of my life.

Survival Skill: Concentration Power

Do Your Read Newspapers?

Wow! This must be the silliest question you have ever heard. Well, you may think that I am nuts. But, I am not. Here is the reason for bringing up this issue. I had read quite a number of books about how our behaviours are affected by the things we see or hear. There is a belief that you mind, your subconscious mind can be affected by constant brainwashing to do certain things. That is the reason many psychologist are so strongly fighting against violence in TV, Movie etc. People, especially children who watches these TV or movies many subconsciously accepting the various thing shown and starting to do what is done in the TV or movies.

Now, come back to the question about reading newspaper. If the newspaper is always filled negative news, your subconscious mind will be influenced by it and you will become negative. When I told my friend about this. He was surprised that I said that because his pastor said the same thing to his church. I am not a Christain but my friend is. Not trying to talk about religion here, but, I just want to say that I am not the only person who thinks likewise.

So, the point really is that we must be careful to Prevent Negative Thoughts Controlling Our Mind. I am not telling you not to read newspaper. The media industry is going to hate me. But, I want to make the point that we don't get too engrossed into reading the news. We need to keep our minds clear and not to be influenced.

Remember, we are facing challenging time and we need to keep our spirit up. We cannot afford to be negative. So, one of the key survival skill that I am talking about is to Fend Off Negative Thoughts.

Survival Skill #19 Fend Off Negative Thoughts

Should I Sell My Car?

I am taking a train to work nowadays. The cost of driving is too high for me. The parking will cost me about $21. The Electronic Road Pricing (ERP - First in the world) will cost me about $5-6 (depending on the time I go home), and the gasoline will cost me about $9-10 depending on traffic condition. That is about $36 per day. My train fare is about $3 per day. I figure that if I can save $33 per day, I can have extra $660 per month. The main reason is that I don't save much time driving. The train ride is about 35 minutes. Walking is about 25 minutes. If I drive, I still have to walk about 5-10 minutes (up and down the office & home). Journey time is about 35 minutes, total time is about 40-45 minutes. So, I save 10-15 minutes per trip. So, in one day I may save 25-30 minutes which will cost me $33. That will convert to $66-80 per hour. Do I earn that much now? Ops! I have a PDA that I loaded with some e-Books that I purchased. I can read them on the train.

My car cost me $101,000 when I purchased it. In Singapore, you can use the car for 10 years. After which you will get be about 15% of the purchase price. That will be about $85,000 over 10 years. That is about $700 per month. Road Tax, Insurance, parking etc will cost around $300 per month. So, the car cost me about $1000 whether I drive it or not. Since I am not driving it to work, I think I should sell my car. It makes a lot of business sense. I guess I have to live with the inconveniences of weekends.

Saving $1,600 a month is quite a lot of money even if you are earning $10,000 per month. I think I will go a put an ad to sell it.

Survival Skill #18: Do Your Sums Right!

Do You Have Self Doubt?

Sometimes, things just hit us without us knowing it. One such thing is the feeling of self doubt. This is specially true when you are faced with some challenges and not able to find any solution quickly. For example, you are in a new job and this is some area of work that you had never attempted. You are at a lost of what to do. You search for various place to find some hints. Nothing! You start to have some self doubt as to whether you are able to handle this job.

This is most crucial time of your life. You had been retrenched for nearly one year and you finally found a job. You want to make it successful. You have no choice. Remember, you are over 45 and it is extremely difficult to land you another job. I am talking about average 45ers. Not those high flyers who are in the top management league. I am talking about people who had been in the mid level management. As you know that the current market is flooded with mid level management, the late babyboomers (those who were born between 1955-1965). The
early babyboomers (1945-1955) are mostly luckier. They had mostly escape the great squeeze and ran off with sufficient amount to retire.

Now, there is no other time that is worse than now to have self-doubt. My dear friend, this is certainly not the time for this. But we always get hit at the worst time. This always happens. Take a break and start thinking, not panicking. This is the worst time to panic. This is the time that calls for great concentration and calmness. Learn to do deep and slow breathing. Do it at
least 3 times a day. Each time, lasting for 3-5 minutes. Try to practise that 5 times a day and after each practice, start to think about solutions. If you can force yourself to do this, you will get great results. I had been through this before. It takes a lot of nerves to stay focus and quit panicking. Learning deep breathing really helps.

Stay calm and survive the most difficult period in your life.

Lookig forward to your success.

Survival Skill #17 Taking Deep and Slow Breathings