Archive for January, 2014

Jan 12 – Hard work is its own reward

Sunday, January 12th, 2014

Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day

cheetah_jan12Jan 12 – People are happiest and the most energized when working towards an aggressive goal using their innate strengths. What goals do you have that make the most of your strengths?

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by Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP

I had no idea how big a deal it was to set aggressive goals – it was just the way I’ve always been. Shoot for the stars, and if you get to the moon – well isn’t that grand!! My first BIG HAIRY AUDACIOUS GOAL (BHAG) was to become an Aerospace Engineer. So this might not seem like that big of a BHAG to some. For me though, it was a BHAG as I did not have a natural aptitude for engineering, though I did have an innate strength for learning. I was so energized and inspired for the four years I pursued that degree. What made it possible for me to find so much joy in this pursuit was this goal was challenging yet attainable, as there was a clear path to achieve it.

Where can you push yourself in ways that are challenging but attainable for you? More so, where can you encourage someone else to do this? Happiness is attained one challenging goal at a time.

Jan 11 – Accessorizing with Blue Tarps?

Saturday, January 11th, 2014
Need Blue Tarps?

Need Blue Tarps?

Jan 11 – “Scope creep” is the tendency of a goal to continue expanding so you never finish. Set your goals so you finish something of useable value every two weeks – this increases your chances of success.

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It all starts out so innocently. You get this great idea for a Saturday afternoon project – like to paint the window frames in your living room since the paint is chipping. And pretty soon, you have the entire bank of windows out, a gaping hole in the house, and are leaving on a week-long business trip in the morning. You decide, wow, a bay window would look really nice here. But you don’t have the funds to afford a pre-built bay window, or to hire someone to install it. A couple weeks later, tiring of looking at the blue tarp over the hole in the front of your house, your friends find a couple of leftover windows they have lying around and together you all design something that actually looks pretty good, but wait – we forgot about a roof over the bay windows! Back on with the blue tarp over the new bay window. You’re chatting about this little mishap with your buddies at work and come to find out there is a guy in your office with some construction experience. He offers to come over on a Saturday to help you finish the little roof for the bay window as winter is coming and it is getting a bit drafty with that blue tarp. THANK GOD for the kindness of strangers…..

Does this sound like some of your projects?

Let’s dissect how this particular scenario could have been prevented from the get-go. How you start a project very well determines how you will finish that project. So if you want to finish more projects, start fewer projects. This means do more investigating and analysis, and understand the feasibility for YOU to do the project with your capabilities and the resources YOU have available. With this window example – a little poking around (and I mean literally here) would have shown that the window frames were rotted. So BEFORE even beginning that project, we should have evaluated all the options for fixing the rotted window frames.

A very small time upfront evaluating what is involved in completing a project makes sure you reduce the chances of getting visits by that “creep.” It is especially annoying when the “creep” requires you to accessorize with blue tarps. If you want to reduce the need for blue tarps in your life, consider becoming a Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) – visit www.cheetahcertifiedpm.com and use the promotion code – “bluetarp” to get this program at the government rate of $550.

Jan 10 – The 5 Changes that Sabotage Your Projects

Friday, January 10th, 2014

cheetah_jan10

Cheetah Certified Project Management (CCPM) Tip of the Day

Jan 10 – The only constant in life is change. The longer it takes you to achieve a goal, the more things in your life will change that may make it even harder to reach it. Complete something of significant value every two weeks towards achieving your goal. This reduces the amount of change that can derail your pursuits.

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If a project is worth starting, it’s worth finishing. When a project takes too long to finish, there are five changes that can sabotage you from finishing your project:

1. People’s availability to help you complete your project can go away.

2. Your priorities to do the work required to finish the project can change.

3. Money that you were counting on to purchase supplies for your project can be reallocated to a more pressing need.

4. A technology application you were counting on using can change or become unavailable.

5. The need for what you wanted to create with your project can disappear.

So BEFORE you start any project, ask yourself: how important is it I finish this project.? If it’s not important for you to finish, consider why you are starting.

Jan 9 – Create a Viable Living From Your Passions

Thursday, January 9th, 2014

cheetah_jan9Jan 9 – Following your passion is so much more sustainable when it includes goals that create value for others. Make sure what you’re going for “pencils” – that means it can help you create a viable living.

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Have you ever noticed how your level of passion increases the more that passion creates a viable living? Creating the match between your passion and making a living can be a challenge. But when you learn how to do this, your abilities to make a living from your passion becomes just the way you work.

So how do you do this? The book “Do What You Are – Discover the Perfect Career through the Secrets of Personality Type” shows how to match your innate personality to your career choice. This is a good start. But once you know the career choice that is your natural fit, how do you make sure you are working in the ways that are right for you? Are you using your passions in the way that best helps you create a viable living? At Cheetah, we partnered with the authors of the “Do What You Are” book to create tools for people to leverage the strengths of their innate personality to better learn, complete their projects, and negotiate. We have found that it helps to bring out the best of the Cheetah staff when we all know how to leverage our unique strengths.

Learn how you can do the same – check out what it takes to become a Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM).

Jan 8 – Measure to Get the Treasure

Thursday, January 9th, 2014

cheetah_jan8Jan 8 – What gets measured gets done. When setting goals, make sure you know the measurements that indicate success for you.

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In every Cheetah course we have our students follow a very detailed schedule and then track how well they did following their schedule. It isn’t just planning the schedule that creates value – it’s also knowing that you’re going to be accountable to measuring how well you did following the schedule that helps people stay on task with meeting their course schedule. Success is measured one milestone at a time. Think about how good you feel when you check off things on your “to do” lists!

In Cheetah’s classroom courses, our coaches are responsible for making sure the course stays on schedule (they also measure their performance on the class schedule, and it’s the topic of many “lessons learned” discussions). The students do have skin in the game, as if they don’t follow the schedule set by the coaches, they have a much more difficult time passing the PMP exam. And they also measure their performance to the schedule at the end of every day in the class. To be successful with their end goal of passing the PMP exam, both students and teachers measure their performance every step of the way by tracking how well they are doing on the baseline and subject matter exams, how well they are doing with their mind mapping, and how well they are doing following the peak performing mind protocols.

But in Cheetah’s online courses, the students create their own schedules for doing all the course work at the beginning of the course. As part of every module, they measure their performance with their schedule. While this is just the way “things” work at Cheetah, since we do after all teach Project Management, it also helps ensure our students complete their online courses.

The measure of success in taking a course is not that you registered for the course. It is that you developed some new capability you did not have before. And the way to do that is to actually DO the course. This is why we have our students create their schedules, as we want them to be successful. It was interesting to find out that other schools have a completion problem with their online students, since we have not had that problem. We were wondering: why? It’s the schedule and the requirement the students measure how well they are doing on the schedule they set for themselves. It helps create intrinsic motivation and excitement for doing the work required to complete the course. When you can measure your success one activity completed at a time and you take time to celebrate your completion, then you feel more successful. Success breeds success – one celebration at a time.

So if you want to assure your success with any goal, set up a plan for achieving that goal. Then, set up and take measurements to track how well you are doing with meeting your plan. Watch what happens……. (and this is why we are so in love with Project Management at Cheetah Learning). Create your measurements and create your success.

Jan 7 – Breaking BAD

Tuesday, January 7th, 2014

cheetah_jan7Cheetah Certified Project Manager Tip of the Day

Jan 7 –Did you know that it takes 21 days to create a new habit? Make micro-shifts you can easily keep to for 21 days – for example, drinking a glass of water with meals and one in-between meals. Make enough of these little changes in your life and your life changes in some big ways.

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Ben Franklin might have been onto something when he said your net worth was your good habits minus your bad habits. If you want to increase your net worth, adopt better habits. It takes 21 days of a practice to make a new habit, so start today to create those habits that will serve you rather than sabotage you in achieving your important life goals. According to BJ Fogg of Stanford University, behavior = motivation x ability x trigger. And goal research shows when you tie a learning goal to an achievement goal, you have better odds of reaching your achievement goal. So let’s work with these insights to create five steps to adopting better habits:

1. Understand your motivation. Why do you want to create a better habit? What is it about your existing habits that you don’t like? When you can tie a visceral level of disgust to a habit you don’t want to keep, it makes it easier not to do it. But why are you attracted to this new habit – why do you want to adopt it? For example, one of my recent habits I wanted to adopt was to write more meaningful, directed work and spend less time sharing texts with friends and family (which I saw as a mind-sucking waste of time, anyhow).

2. Look at your abilities to adopt the new habit. Honestly appraise if you can do it. What do you need to learn to do it? Who is already doing it and what are they doing? For my goal, I signed up for a class on becoming a best-selling author. It was a 16-week online course that met once a week. The way the course was designed held me accountable for writing meaningful content on a daily basis.

3. Find out what triggers your bad habits and remove those triggers. To move away from my texting time-suck, I found that texting was a feedback system. The fewer texts I wrote, the fewer texts I received. But I also found out that some smart phones made it easier to text than others. I was an avid iPhone user. But I ran out of space on my iPhone because I loved to take pictures. So when I went to evaluate my options, I found the Samsung 4 smart phone could take a SDC card so I could take a lot more pictures. I made the switch. But unbeknownst to me, I could no longer receive iMessages from my iPhone-using friends. Trigger problem solved. I had no idea I wasn’t even getting the text messages. And within a couple of days my texting ways were over.

4. Develop triggers for your new habit. I wanted to write more meaningful content every day, so I came up with this Cheetah Certified Project Manager tip of the day. We found all types of ways to use these tips and now I am writing a blog post every day relating to these tips.

5. Focus on what you can learn rather than just creating a new habit. When you tie learning a new skill to an achievement goal, you significantly increase your chances of achieving your goal. And if that goal happens to be creating a new habit, make a commitment to a daily deliberate practice of a new skill. For my writing goal, I now spend thirty minutes a day creating informative blog posts.

Want to learn how to create effective strategies to adopt better habits for completing your important projects? Check out the Cheetah Certified Project Manager Program.

Jan 6 – Microburst Focus

Monday, January 6th, 2014

Cheetah Certified Project Manager Tip of the Day

cheetah_jan6Jan 6 –Focus in short micro-bursts of time on tasks with no distractions. For today, work on one task for thirty minutes with no disruptions. If you find yourself getting distracted, try listening to binaural beats while working to increase your awareness. Check out www.bwgen.com for a free download of these audio files.

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Like many companies these days, at Cheetah Learning we spend our work days interacting with our technology . Much of this work is perpetually interrupted from a co-worker or a student who may need something from us immediately. And while we are for the most part a virtual company (aside from our in-person work meetings from time to time), these interruptions can take many forms – from texts, to the company internal Facebook page, to instant messaging, to emailing. Taking the time to completely focus on one task to its completion is a luxury we allow ourselves twice a day in short, 15-30 minute microbursts.

We have all adapted to using binuaral beats to help our brains get into the “focus” zone. The day in and day out world we live in of constant interruptions puts the brain into what is called the “high beta” state. We have four brain states:

1. Delta – this is our predominant state when we are sleeping.

2. Theta – this is the state when we are just falling asleep or just waking up.

3. Alpha – this is the daydreaming state and the hypnogogic state.

4. Beta – this is the state where you are awake. Low beta is the state of relaxed focus and it is the brain state we teach our students to attain in both the Cheetah Certified PM and Cheetah Accelerated Exam Prep courses for the PMP.

High beta is great when you need to respond quickly to requests and bounce around from one thing to the next, but it is very hard to focus and concentrate in high beta. To shift into low beta quickly for a short period of time, we use a program called the Brain Wave Generator – www.bwgen.com. While this program is fantastic for maintaining a low brain wave state to focus and finish an important task, for learning Cheetah, students learn a number of techniques to exist in a low beta state for longer periods of time. The low beta state significantly improves long-term retention and the ability to master new skills.

Give “microburst focus” a try the next time you need to get something done in your busy day.

Jan 5 – Distraction Attractions

Sunday, January 5th, 2014

Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP

Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day

Even though I’m now an empty nest Mom, I remember the days when my kids got their first cell phones.   Lucky for me, that was just a couple years before texting was big.  But the societal pressures then were as great as they are now to be always accessible for my kids, and vice versa.   If I wasn’t accessible to them 24/7 I was some how not being a good parent.   And if they weren’t accessible to me – OMG, what horrors of all horrors had befallen them?   It’s remarkable we all survived.

So, it’s no wonder most of us are now addicted to connecting with others 24/7.   But there is a price to pay for all of this.  The more you give in to these instant communications – be it texting, instant message chat, emailing, Facebook-ing – the more you develop a part of your brain that releases the feel-good neurotransmitter, dopamine.  Over time, it becomes harder to focus and finish anything of substance.  I remember before the internet came into existence, I used to knit sweaters and make quilts; now, sometimes making dinner even seems like too much of an undertaking.

There are ways though to counter this increasing inability to focus and pursue more complex goals.   And this is what Cheetah Certified Project Managers learn how to do.  To learn more check out: www.cheetahcertifiedpm.com

Jan 4 – The Amazing Insights from Wonder

Saturday, January 4th, 2014

Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP

Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day

How we react to the world becomes what we get from the world.   About a year ago, I moved into a condo in Portland to help my daughter launch her business called YogaAnne.   I went for it and set up a TV set with the home theater amplifier, the Apple TV, the cable box, and the Blu-ray DVD player.  For about six months, every time I would take a break to watch TV, it was fifteen minutes of absolute frustration about how to even turn the darn TV on – there were four separate remotes.  If my daughter or one of her younger friends was not over to help, I didn’t even bother to watch it as I just didn’t want to deal with the hassles.   Then I decided to take the “wonder” approach.   I said, “I wonder if I can set this up so it’s easy to use every time.”  There was no pressure, as I was just exploring.   I pulled all the components out, and went about doing just that.   I then documented it so now, when I sit down to watch TV, I know just what buttons to push to watch Cable, Netflix, or a DVD – and it even all works through the surround sound TV.   Taking the wonder approach took me about 45 minutes to get it all set up so it works.   I wonder: why I didn’t just do that in the first place?

What I have grown to love about “wonder” is how it takes the pressure off me to “get it right.”   Even more, when I do this about my reactions to others’ behavior, I stop feeling like I need to fix anything.   I now find myself spending more and more of my day in the easier and more fun mode of “wonder.”  What a wonderful place to be.

I wonder what the world would look like if more of us lived in this space?  www.cheetahcertifiedpm.com

Jan 3 – Complaints to Commitments

Friday, January 3rd, 2014

Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP

Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day

The very act of creating New Year’s Resolutions is the resolve to create something different in your life than what you are currently experiencing.    Setting a resolution to create something different, rather than complaining about how things are, helps develop the neural networks in your brain to in fact put in motion what you need do to achieve your resolution.   This is called the “can do” attitude.   Try out this experiment for yourself.   Whenever you feel yourself slipping into the complaining mode – “this won’t work, it has never worked, I can’t do this” – find the opposite: where it has already worked for you.   Make a commitment to yourself to keep doing this.   Pretty soon you’ll have the “can do” neural networks that makes it easier to adopt the habits you’ll need to achieve your resolutions. Learn more about how you can create “can do” neural networks at www.cheetahcertifiedpm.com.