Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day
March 10 – Who you are and what you do are two different aspects of you. Achieving goals is what you do. Who you are is shaped by how you achieve your goals. You can be kind, caring, compassionate, fun, adventurous, playful, happy, healthy, generous, resourceful, and peaceful while, at the same time, focused and driven to achieve your goals and dreams.
To make sure your projects get done - FAST - set a closer deadline.
March 9 – The time to complete a task typically takes the time you have to complete that task. This is why, if you want to get something done fast, you give the job to the busiest person you have. To achieve your goals faster, allocate less time to do them.
Take a moment to bask in the glory of your accomplishments.
March 8 – When you complete even small tasks, such as a “to-do list,” take ten seconds to bask in the satisfaction of your accomplishment. This strengthens your neural connections that can help you complete larger goals.
Who else benefits from your completion of a project?
March 7 – Who else benefits from your completion of a task, project, or goal? Discover ways they can help you finish.
Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day
March 6 – Completion may mean something different to you than it does to others. Find out what finishing looks like to those who are working with you on a project.
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Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP
Are we ever really finished? I have been involved in so many construction and remodel projects where you are never really “done” until you sell the place to someone else. This is why I like event-oriented projects, as once the date of the event comes and goes (like a party), you’re DONE. What I’ve found time and time again is what is that “done’ to one person may not be “done’ to another. It is usually the person doing the work who declares completion before the person for whom the work is being done. Not having consensus on what “done” means can and does create significant conflict on projects. So it makes sense to spend some time developing consensus on what “done” means BEFORE you even start. This is the purpose of contracts – to get it in writing what completion will look like to all parties. Whenever anyone says, “I do business with a handshake,” I RUN fast in the opposite direction. So often in the development of the contract, you realize what you considered done and what the other party considers done are miles apart. And if you had relied on a hand shake regarding each of your unique definitions of “done,” both of you can suffer significant heart ache.
I am very clear on what completion looks like to me on projects I start as a way to keep my sanity. I find the better I can articulate what finishing looks like to me, the more likely it is I will actually finish what it is I start. Just today, I finished a project I have been planning for several weeks. I moved a large hyperbaric chamber from Portland, Oregon to Reno, Nevada. Moving it required reassembling it when I got to Reno and making sure it still worked. It wasn’t sufficient that I got it out of Portland – what mattered was that it was useable when it got to Reno. Yes, I was tired when I got here, as moving it out of the Portland location was a lot of work. But it was important to me I finished. Finishing meant that I knew the chamber was set up and working in its new location. I made this priority number one this week.
What is your most important project this week? How can you make sure you finish it so you can reap the benefits?
Who is doing what you would like to do? What type of clues have they left for you to follow?
Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day
March 4 – Find those people you aspire to be like and see what it took for them to create what they did.
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Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP
Early in my career, I was an Air Force Officer and an Aerospace Engineer. I was sent to a class taught by David Steinberg on designing electronics to withstand vibration environments in jet aircrafts. Yes, there was a person making a living teaching such a class. And he was making a great living doing it. My field at the time was not just the vibration environments these electronics had to withstand, but all the environmental conditions – from massive temperature fluctuations, humidity, and corrosive salt fog, to sand and dust. I sat in Mr. Steinberg’s class and calculated what he was making for each student (there were twenty of us in the class). Then I inquired with the hotel how much it cost to hold a class there. After the class, I took the material to a copy shop near me and asked how much it could cost to reproduce something like that. I set up my first business model on how to make a living teaching a niche engineering class. I was twenty five years old.
When I got out of the Air Force, I taught my first course. It was a three day class on how to design electronics to withstand all the environmental conditions they would encounter in a wide variety of vehicles (planes, trains, boats, and automobiles). I actually got people to register for it. My big break came in a different realm, though – defense contractors had to learn how to set up their programs to better design and test their electronic systems for these environmental conditions, and they had to prove in their proposals for competitive and very lucrative government contracts that they knew how to do this. I started getting hired by a wide variety of Aerospace firms to lead their development and proposal writing efforts for this field. I delivered a two day class on how to create the environmental design and testing programs for the electronics, and I hired Mr. Steinberg to come in and teach his two day vibrations course after mine.
I followed the success of Mr. Steinberg and built on it with my own unique capabilities. I was at lunch with one of my clients, from Texas Instruments, and the gentleman who hired me asked how it was working for Mr. Steinberg (he was in his 60s). I said, “Oh I don’t work for Mr. Steinberg, he works for me.” It was a mutually beneficial arrangement as I was able to get David more work with my contacts than he was able to connect with on his own. And my clients won because they got a more comprehensive approach to designing their electronic systems.
Who in life is doing what you think you’d like to do? How can you do something similar? And better yet, how can you help someone else be even more successful? This was my early formula for success and it continues to be my formula today. When you become a Cheetah Certified Project Manager, you learn how to leverage your unique strengths with those of others to create more opportunities together than either one of you could create on your own, just like I did with Mr. Steinberg.
You create the story of what is around the corner.
Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day
March 3 – Be careful with the story you tell yourself about how you are going to be in the future. It may, in fact, become your reality.
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Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP
The non-profit agency Koinonia of Northern Nevada, who participated in our pro-bono project management training programs, helps foster parents better care for the most at-risk foster children. We help them out by donating $10 of every registration from the Cheetah Certified Project Manager program. One of the issues at-risk foster children face is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that no one loves them. It’s a continual story they tell themselves, and often they go out and make sure it in fact happens with one family after another. That is, unless the family is trained and supported by the people who operate Koinonia and they learn how to interact with these children in a way that allows them to start to tell themselves a different story.
While most of us have not had the challenges in life these children have, we do all tell ourselves stories about how our life is supposed to go. And then we find validation for those stories. The kicker is that we are not even conscious of many of these stories. Think about the things in your life that happen over and over and over that you don’t like. Let’s take a very common story – not having enough money for all the bills that come in. If this happens for you, think about a different story you could start to tell – like maybe, “I make more than I spend.” See how many ways you can play out that story in your life and see what happens.
What are the stories in your life you want to experience? A good place to start is with the stories that are happening in your life you don’t like. What are some stories that can create what you would prefer? When you find yourself dwelling on the story you don’t like, stop. Shift your brain to the story you would prefer. Making a deliberate choice to stop thinking about the story you don’t like and replacing it with one you do like is a way you can retrain those ingrained neural networks to develop a more effective thought pattern. When you become a Cheetah Certified Project Manager, you learn how to tell and live a much more empowered story of your life.
Tell the story of your life being an epic adventure.
Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day
March 2 – Whatever your goal, envision yourself at the completion. Post pictures of what it will be like when you achieve your goal. Tell stories of what happens next. Create the epic adventure that is your life.
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Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP
In the Cheetah Mastermind process, the very first activity the group does is create a vision board for their dreams. It’s a fascinating group process to participate in as while they are creating their boards with the others in their group, they start to share stories with each other of what their pictures mean to them. It is these stories as much as the pictures that help them create the epic adventures of their lives.
Think about the stories you tell about yourself. Where are you showing up in life as you really are? How are the stories different there than in the places where you feel in some way you haven’t fully measured up to what you wanted to be? For me, this was my life as an Aerospace Engineer. While it was impressive to the outside world that I was an Aerospace Engineer, in my inner world, I was wondering, “Is this all there is?” My happiest days as an Aerospace Engineer were when I was doing a presentation. When they needed someone in the group to volunteer to do the mandatory office quality training, I happily volunteered. I also gladly volunteered to do recruiting for the company and any type of outreach where I got to talk about the business of Aerospace Engineering. When I was in these roles, I easily was able to tell stories of how the experiences would go for me – I could see myself excelling. We all have this inner hero in us. This is what people learn how to bring out in the Cheetah Certified Project Manager program – how they want their inner hero to show up in the world.
Where and how have you let your inner hero show up to create the epic adventure of your life recently? Share your story on the Cheetah Learning FB page – http://tinyurl.com/lvy6xxy
You can create the life you prefer when you start with the end in mind.
Cheetah Certified Project Manager (CCPM) Tip of the Day
March 1 – When you start with the end in mind, you increase your chances of creating the end you would prefer.
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Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP
When our students start the Cheetah Exam Prep for the PMP exam course on Monday, every thought is on how they are going to feel when they walk out of that exam center being PMP certified. It is this feeling that carries them through the intense week to achieve the very significant accomplishment of passing the PMP exam after only four days of preparation. Believing is achieving for the 50,000+ Cheetah students who have taken the challenge of passing the PMP exam in four days of intense prep with Cheetah Learning. Only ten percent of people take the Cheetah approach. For those that for, whatever their reasons, choose not to go this approach, many spend over six months studying and forty percent of them fail. Having a successfully proven path to follow does help the 98% of Cheetah students who do pass with the accelerated four-day approach we pioneered 13 years ago.
Over the years, hundreds of companies and individuals have attempted to copy Cheetah’s four-day approach, but they miss key elements of it as they don’t fully understand all the nuances of accelerated learning. Lack of confidence with an approach not fully understood by the copycats hurts their students’ abilities to pass, and these operations soon find other, way more reliable ways to earn a living. We get many of their students retaking the exam after going through their programs. Every year it’s a different set of companies that offer what they call a “boot camp” approach – except for Cheetah Learning.
We don’t call our program a “boot camp,” as it is not. A “boot camp” assumes you adopt a set of behaviors for a very short period of time. Cheetah students, though, learn how to learn for life in their four-day experience with Cheetah Learning to pass the PMP exam. They don’t participate in a grueling boot camp experience to pass an exam. Most report that it’s an exhilarating, life-changing experience that does in fact help them create a life they prefer far beyond passing the PMP exam. And this is why 85% of Cheetah students come from a referral and we stay in business year after year after year, when these other PMP exam prep companies come and go like so many other flavor-of-the -ay management fads.
When you can help people genuinely create a life they prefer, they tell others about it. This is Cheetah’s core business strategy; it’s built into every course we develop and why we are known as the “gold standard” in project management education. Check out how you can create a life you would prefer – become a Cheetah Certified Project Manager.
