Everyday Cheetah

The Project Management Professionals at Cheetah Learning (http://www.cheetahlearning.com/) have chosen “Reduce Workplace Conflict” as their theme for the month of December. As part of that effort, the company is offering a free Worry-O-Meter download that helps businesses calculate an employee’s risk tolerance.

In the fall of 1988 Bobby McFerrin’s mega-mellow “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” became the first a cappella song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Its lyrics included the phrase: “In every life we have some trouble. When you worry, you make it double.”

To help avoid that “double trouble,” Cheetah Learning, Project Management Institute’s 2008 Provider of the Year, is offering a free Worry-O-Meter download that helps businesses calculate an employee’s risk tolerance, and, in so doing, create an environment where it’s less likely that conflict can take root and flourish.

The Worry-O-Meter is being made available as part of Cheetah’s December goal to “Reduce Workplace Conflict.” It can be accessed and downloaded by filling out the form on the company’s home page at http://www.cheetahlearning.com/.

First-time visitors who sign up can also access Daily Tips, Tools and Deals, which include these valuable free items: PMP Exam Prep SmartStart Guide, PMP Practice Exam, the 2 PDU Skills Assessment Course and Getting Started with PM Guide.

Michelle LaBrosse, CEO and founder of Cheetah Learning, says the Worry-O-Meter is a great tool to gauge the risk tolerance of project team members.

“For some people, uncertain times trigger a sense of impending doom rather than a sense of incredible excitement,” LaBrosse said.

Cheetah’s Worry-O-Meter helps businesses identify issues of concern, determine the probability they might occur, assess the impact if they did occur and (most importantly) create a countermeasure – to either prevent the issue from taking place, or determine what could be done if it happens.

“People have different levels of risk they can tolerate on projects based on their experience, the importance they place on the outcome of the project, and their personality,” LaBrosse explained. “Find out your project team members risk tolerance levels to better understand how and why they perceive risks facing your project.”

To help businesses tackle obstacles like worry, risk and conflict, LaBrosse writes a monthly column titled the “Know How Network“. She also shares tips and thoughts at Twitter.com/MichelleCheetah.

For more information about Cheetah Learning and its various training offerings, call toll free in the U.S. at (888) 659-2013. Outside the U.S., call (602) 220-1263. To sign up for a variety of free tips and tools, use the online form on the Cheetah home page at http://www.CheetahLearning.com.

ABOUT: Cheetah Learning is a Project Management Institute Registered Education Provider and is International Association of Continuing Education and Training Certified. Cheetah was awarded the Project Management Institute Professional Development Provider of the Year for 2008 for the significant contribution it made to the field of project management with its accelerated approach to teaching and doing project management.

As part of their December theme to “Reduce Workplace Conflict,” the Project Management Professionals atCheetah Learning (http://www.cheetahlearning.com/) are offering “Conflict Resolution Tips,” a free download, just one of many that Cheetah routinely makes available to help make business professionals more productive.

As Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra once observed, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else.”

Berra’s comment aptly summarizes why some projects fail: “The first mistake teams make that causes numerous arguments as a project progresses is not coming to agreement about their basic objectives.”

That sentence is the opening statement on “Conflict Resolution Tips,” a free download offered by the Project Management Professionals at Cheetah Learning as part of their December theme to “Reduce Workplace Conflict.”

For access to the “Conflict Resolution Tips” download, as well as a variety of other Daily Tips, Tools and Deals, fill out the form on the Cheetah home page at http://www.cheetahlearning.com/.

Resolving conflict is just one facet of what helps produce the speed and efficiency of “The Cheetah Way,” Project Management done correctly. That means one of the first steps in avoiding situations where people’s emotions explode is to “Kick off a project the right way from the beginning.”

“Watching fireworks light up the sky awakens the wonder in us all,” explains Michelle LaBrosse, CEO and founder of Cheetah Learning, “(but) when fireworks light up a conference room and team members are ready to explode, it can be the true test of your Project Management and leadership skills.”

To help businesses tackle obstacles like conflict on an ongoing basis, LaBrosse writes a monthly column titled the “Know How Network“. She also shares tips and thoughts at Twitter.com/MichelleCheetah.

Among the Cheetah tips regarding conflict resolution:

“What you focus on is what you get.”

“What gets measured gets done.”

“Differing expectations are the root cause of all conflict.”

“When you move from interactions riddled with conflict, you can move towards becoming a high performing team.”

For more information about Cheetah Learning and its various training offerings, call toll free in the U.S. at (888) 659-2013. Outside the U.S., call (602) 220-1263. To sign up for a variety of free tips and tools, use the online form on the Cheetah home page at http://www.cheetahlearning.com/.

ABOUT:
Cheetah Learning is a Project Management Institute Registered Education Provider and is International Association of Continuing Education and Training Certified. Cheetah was awarded the Project Management Institute Professional Development Provider of the Year for 2008 for the significant contribution it made to the field of project management with its accelerated approach to teaching and doing project management.

If surveys taken on a regular basis over the past 30 years hold true, business owners and the managers who serve them spent between 25 and 40 percent of their time in 2011 resolving conflicts – and they can expect that trend to continue in 2012.

That means multiple billions of dollars in lost revenue – from missed days and distractions, to decreased motivation and burnout, not to mention litigation or even sabotage when things end up going wrong.

But not everyone agrees it has to be like that, particularly team members at Cheetah Learning (http://www.CheetahLearning.com), known as “The Leaders In Accelerated Project Management Training.” They believe that Project Management done correctly (“The Cheetah Way”) helps significantly reduce conflict.

Among their key points:

• Kick off a project the right way from the beginning.
• Set up a charter so that team members start off on the same page.
• Develop relationships that prevent destructive conflict from derailing the project.
• Define conflicts that could impact performance.

Those and other points can be found in the book “Cheetah Project Management, The Fastest Way to Reach Your Goals,” published by MAKLAF Press, ISBN-10: 0-9761749-5-2.

“The first step in conflict resolution is to establish the ground rules that deal with conflict up front, setting the stage to move quickly through conflict when it occurs,” says Michelle LaBrosse, CEO and founder of Cheetah, Project Management Institute’s 2008 Provider of the Year.

“When conflict does occur, it takes only one calm person to prevent it from escalating and to move toward a quick resolution,” she adds. “If done routinely when problems are still small, this method prevents any conflict from developing into a more destructive problem.”

To bring attention to the issue and help resolve the problem, the Cheetah team has made “Reduce Workplace Conflict” the company’s theme for December. Additional information can be found at Blog.CheetahLearning.com, which includes Daily Tips, Tools and Deals “to transform conflict from destructive experiences to growth experiences.”

“Conflict can be an opportunity to learn good habits that will enable teams to obtain long-term sustainable peak performance,” Cheetah’s CEO said.

To help businesses on an ongoing basis, LaBrosse addresses issues like conflict in a monthly column titled the “Know How Network” as well as in a quarterly magazine that can be found at http://www.cheetahphast.com. She also shares tips and thoughts at twitter.com/michellecheetah.

For more information about Cheetah Learning and its various training offerings, call toll free in the U.S. at (888) 659-2013. Those outside the U.S. can call (602) 220-1263. To sign up for a variety of free tips and tools, use the online form on the Cheetah home page at http://www.CheetahLearning.com.

ABOUT: Cheetah Learning is a Project Management Institute (PMI) Registered Education Provider and is International Association of Continuing Education and Training (IACET) Certified. Cheetah was awarded the Project Management Institute Professional Development Provider of the Year for 2008 for the significant contribution it made to the field of project management with its accelerated approach to teaching and doing project management.

energyoremotions

The book Power vs. Force by David Hawkins, published in 1995 is about the energy of emotions.   Hawkins measured the energetic response of various emotional states and plotted them on a logarithmic scale.   The last columns from drive over to the right are columns I created based on my understanding of his work (I welcome debate as this as I am just exploring these ideas but find it a very good behavioral model).   The drive column is in what drives people to experience specific emotional states.   The zero value in the row starting with the term permitting is significant.  Any state of being above that line - for any energy you put to living in the respective state, provides you with a return shown in last column (based on his logarithmic scale for the energy of emotions).  My company Cheetah Learning operates at the drive level - Your Success is My Success.  By living at this level, we get a 10,000 times return on energy invested.   Anyone who knows my lifestyle and the lifestyle that we’ve created for the entire Cheetah team is probably nodding in agreement on this statement.

We made it to San Francisco!!!!

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP

Initiation - For one reason or another, I find myself doing several thousand mile road trips a couple times a year.   Jumping into a car, van, truck and camper combo and driving for four days is just not something that new to me.   In September, I adopted two four week old kitties who had been abandoned.   So when I had to get to San Francisco to do the keynote presentation for International Project Management day November 4, 2010, it just made sense to pack the kitties and the puppy into the cheetah mini-van and head to San Fran from Connecticut.   It took about a week to customize the mini-van for the road trip.   Besides making it safe and comfortable for the baby animals, I also decided that unlike other road trips, I was going to survive on food that if I didn’t grow, at least I prepared from ingredients I knew the origins.

Planning - Provisioning this type of trip takes a bit more planning.  I didn’t want to spend a lot of time cooking on the road so I had to have food that would keep for at least four days.   And when I am driving, I want to drive.   I’m not much into stopping to eat a meal.   So whatever I prepared had to be easy and not messy to eat while driving.   Plus I wanted to eat food that would keep me awake and alert, without having to rely on drinking copious quantities of caffeine.   Also, it would have to be food that I was somewhat into as I did not want to be tempted to eat fast food.   I can only be so disciplined.

Execution -   To fit the above criteria, I made my homemade bread that is made from wheat I mill myself.   I learned at cooking school in France that this bread does really well if you slice it very thin using a meat slicer.   A small amount of peanut butter on one of these thin slices of bread with a little non-fat milk makes a great snack that kept me satiated for several hours.   This became one of my staples.   I also made a berry smoothie with non-fat greek yogurt and non-fat milk.   Without a lot of sugar, this shake gave me a power boost without the concurrent sugar spike then energy sag.   For snacking, I made beef jerky from rump roasts from my cattle.   It takes forever to chew and the protein kept my  energy level high.   I also learned how to make this vegetable soup called Pistou Soup at cooking school in France.   The soup is all vegetables with beans and left-over home made pasta (in CT most came out of my garden).  The soup can easily be heated up in microwaves at the quick mart gas stations or in hotel room microwaves.   This soup balances out all the beef jerky snacking while driving.  I did have to eat the soup while stopped - usually at night in the hotel after 15 hours of driving.  (I opted NOT to sleep in the van too).  The quick marts also let you have free hot water and I could make my own tea back at the mini-van.

Monitoring and Control - I used a cooler that could be plugged into the outlet of the mini-van.   This meant that I did not have to get ice. However, the cooler would not run unless the mini-van was running.  I could get away with this as it was late October during the road trip and it got below 40 at night on the route I was taking.   I had a kitchen set up in the back of the mini-van where the hatch acted as a rain tarp. In back of the mini-van kitchen, it was set up for easy access to the most used items - such as paper towels, peanut butter, tea.  I also brought 5 gallons of water - which I used a number of times for a variety of reasons throughout the trip.   It helped that I set up easy access to the water as well.

Closeout - I have more easy to eat foods for the road trip back.   In Portland I discovered this little pie maker and now have small little chicken pies to eat.   On the trip out, I had the soup in this vacuum packed sealer bag that I could microwave.  But it was kind of messy eating it this way.  So for the return trip, I am using glass bowls with the clip on lids - it will be easier to microwave and eat the soup all in one in those bowls.   The baby animal management system went fine - I have to make sure that I keep the access to the front seat area blocked as the kitties are very exploratory and have found their way recently to my feet - not cool.

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP

Mastermind Your Future - Create a Better Life - it

I had no idea what I was in for when my friend Nishanto Kane asked me to lead a mastermind group for her and a group of her small business friends in Simsbury, Connecticut.   Nishanto assembled a group of 12 people for her Mastermind Group.  She got the idea after reading Napoleon Hill’s book - Think and Grow Rich.   We had our first meeting in August and agreed to meet every two to three weeks throughout the year.  I quickly adopted a format based on what I had found worked with groups over my years of running accelerated learning events and leading project teams.   This proved to be one of our critical success factors.  After just four months of running this group, every participating member has significantly increased and super charged their business.   It is like all of us are on this wild cheetah going for the fastest ride of our lives.

After the second meeting,  one of the participants asked me if I could teach her how to facilitate my flavor of Mastermind.    Not wanting to let down one of my mastermind group members, I said - of course.   Let me go create an online certified Cheetah Mastermind Facilitator’s program.   And off we went - at cheetah speed.

This experience has been nothing short of amazing.  The people who have gone through the program and who have emerged as certified Cheetah Mastermind Facilitators are taking the world by storm with their own Cheetah Mastermind groups.  We are even working with some groups to create a virtual model for running Cheetah Mastermind Groups.  To learn more - check out www.cheetahmastermind.com

To become a Certified Cheetah Mastermind Facilitator, you have to successfully complete a 33 hour online course where you learn how to successfully lead your own Cheetah Mastermind group.   The course list price is $999, but as a “bleader” of the Everyday PM blog, you can get it for $333 - use the promotion code blogmaster at the Cheetah Mastermind Course.

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP

I had no idea when I was invited to be the opening keynote speaker at the San Francisco PMI Chapter’s International Project Management day conference, that it would be following on the heels of the San Francisco Giants winning the world series.   When this happened, we decided to dedicate the keynote presentation to the San Francisco Giants and had our fabulous Sweet Adeline singing sensation Jean Steinmetz, PMP create a song celebrating Project Managers.  It is sung to the tune of Take Me Out to the Ballpark.   The sing along was a lot of fun.   Here is the video.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux4tDLNwiaI

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP

As every project manager knows, communication is 99.995% of the job of a project manager.  Good conversational skills can also build better relationships - in both the personal and the professional parts of life.   I have been facilitating a mastermind group for the past two months.  One of the participants wanted me to teach the group active listening skills as she was not feeling “heard.”   I “heard” something a bit different though - LOL.

Over the past six months I have been studying how your emotions play themselves out in your body.   Your emotions start in your body - originating from the limbic part of your brain.   And THEN your higher level brain labels them.   HOWEVER, even if you try to hide your emotions, your body is still playing out their scripts.   And we all can read this whether the person is articulating it or not.   Say for example I am annoyed at you - but I don’t articulate it and instead try to smooth things out.   Your body will sense and intuit that I am in fact annoyed with you and will act accordingly.  Depending on how you see yourself with respect to me, your body will respond differently.   You might respond in your body by being annoyed back if you feel I have no right to be annoyed at you.  Or you might respond by being amused if you feel more powerful than me.  Or you might feel scared if you feel I am somehow more powerful than you.  Or you could be curious why I feel that way if you are living confident and comfortable in your own power.

I find the best way to build rapport is by the last feeling - one of openness and curiosity.   No matter what someone else is feeling, I have found that relaxing into my power enables me to interact with them from a place of compassion and caring.   I call this compassionate engagement.  The majority of people have positive intentions (as do I).   And it is in recognizing my own positive intentions, and operating from that perspective that I can create more positive interactions.   It also helps me to practice some of the skills that we teach in the Cheetah Communicating through Conflict and Negotiations courses as well.   The two skills that I use from these two course for Conversational Aikido are to state observable facts - this releases you from having to make judgements about people’s behaviors.  And to ask permission based questions - which stimulates buy in to a dialog.

Conversational Aikido - Harmonizing Relationships One Emotion At a Time

Michelle LaBrosse, PMP

Square Foot Garden May 10, 2010

This project fulfilled several requirements (i.e. it is what is known as a “robust” solution). The first requirement was to create a beautiful vegetable garden that would increase the property value. The second requirement was to increase the occupants’ capability of being self-sustaining. The third requirement was to shore up the hill to stop the effects of gravity on the pool and the other landscaping up the hill.

Project Planning & Execution

Site Selection - This project required that we build a retaining wall FIRST and then build the square foot garden beds on the top of the newly flattened surface. We choose the site right off the pool to take advantage of the existing fencing AND to help stop the gradual slippage of the pool and the surrounding decking down the hill. This site also is in full sun the entire day.

Site Prep - My cousin - Bill LaBrosse and his friend (Tom Butcher) (both masons) built the retaining wall. I know why these guys stay so thin - that is a lot of manual labor building the wall and back filling it by hand with the six ton of gravel. They spent three weeks living at the house for four days at a time working on this project 15 hours a day.

Building the Beds - This took two truck loads of material - peat moss, manure and vermiculite. We are putting in several thousand worms to have direct in dirt composting and to help with soil aeration. The worms as part of their digestion process excrete waste that is high in nitrogen and phosporus. The goal is to do minimal intervention in the soil throughout the years. The raised beds eliminate soil compaction.

Planting Prep - the vegetable selection was based on the availability to harvest, shelf life of the vegetables and resale possibilities. We selected shallots as they have a 120 day growing season, capture a pretty high market value when packaged correctly, and have a shelf life of 8 months. We also planted other root vegetables that have a long shelf life - carrots, beets, sweet potatoes. We planted pumpkins and winter squashes as well that have a long shelf life.

Protection - we selected the fencing to match the pool fencing to ensure the garden maintained the beauty of the property. The height of the retaining wall will keep out the most invasive predators in the area - the deer. We are installing wire mess along the bottom foot of the fence to keep out the rabbits and other small critters.

Project Monitoring and Control

The weather was the biggest detriment to our schedule. The guys were only rained out of working a half day. Luckily the most rain was on the three days of the week they weren’t working. Our first load of manure was real “shit,” excuse the pun. It was loaded with plastic fencing and lots of hay. We used that to patch up places in the lawn. We went to packaged manure because we really do not want weeds in this garden and with the worm plan, we are going to have very good soil for years to come. We figured the expense to get the dirt the right composition from the get go will pay off in increased yields and less maintenance for years to come.

We had a weight problem with the beds (the dirt was separating the wood) so Bill and Tom used an old deck they had just pulled up on another part of the property to make a deck between the beds. They then back filled the rest with larger gravel. It gave the garden a beautifully finished look.

Project Closeout

Will report back on the garden yield at the end of the season. All in all, this project was very satisfying as it is beautiful and will prevent any more settling of the pool decking and the other landscaping.