How to Stay Happy at Work

How to Stay Happy at Work

How often do you get the Sunday evening blues? Every now and again, or every week without fail? If it’s the latter, maybe you should think about moving on… But lots of people find themselves in the situation where they’re not ready to move jobs just yet – perhaps because they’ve only been in the role a short time, or because they want to gain more experience. So if you find yourself in the situation where you’re in a job that is okay but not brilliant, or that you really need to see through for a period of time, what can you do to make it more interesting and - dare we say it – more fun? Here are some suggestions: Positive Thinking Focus on the positives – what do you really like about your job (come on, there must be something)? How could you incorporate more of that into your working day? Remind yourself of the other positive aspects of your work – your friends and colleagues, for instance. Challenge Yourself Find new challenges. One of the reasons that we can get restless in our job is, quite simply, boredom. Think about ways in which you could make your role more interesting. Perhaps you could volunteer to mentor new staff, or spend some time every week shadowing people in other departments to get a broader perspective on the business? Discuss your ideas with your manager. Flexible Working Is there scope for you to work more flexibly? Working from home one day a week, for example, could give you more variety. This is not an excuse to get up late and lie around watching daytime TV, though – you’ll need to be able to show some output for your time away from the office! Again, discuss the options with your manager. Learn More If you feel you’re not being stimulated enough mentally, consider doing some training or a course that is work-related: it will give you new insights, help to keep you fresh, and will be a useful addition to your CV when you are ready to move on. Network Network more. If meeting new people is not already part of your role, find ways to incorporate it. Meeting people and getting fresh perspectives can help you to keep yourself interested and interesting. If there don’t seem to be many networking opportunities where you are, create some! Organize a team outing, or arrange for you and your colleagues to meet up with staff from another part of the company. Have Some Fun Inject a bit of fun into your workplace. That could be as simple as croissants on a Monday morning or a team drink on Friday afternoon. Or it could be a more structured social event. Your work colleagues don’t have to be your bosom buddies, but you’ll enjoy your working day much more if there’s a bit of banter and humour around. Just because your work is a serious business doesn’t mean you can’t have fun while you do it! Improve Your Social Life Make an effort to do more interesting things outside of work. If your working week consists of getting up in the morning, going to work, coming home, having dinner, slumping in front of the TV and then going to bed, your job is going to have a disproportionate impact on your overall mood. Try to fit a couple of social engagements into your week – a dancing class or an art exhibition, perhaps, or just a catch-up with friends you haven’t seen for a while. Having something to look forward to during the week will help to make it more bearable. Prioritise Your Workload If you find that your problem is you’re working such long hours that you don’t have time to have fun outside work, let alone in the office, you need to tackle this. Get used to prioritizing your workload – negotiate extensions to deadlines if necessary – and make yourself leave the office on time at least 3 nights a week. Most of us have periods when we’re extra-busy and end up working long hours, but if this is happening to you routinely, you need to get out of that rut. Source: Monster

10 Tips for Group Discussions

Well if the no. of candidates is high, many corporate and B Schools organize group discussions or GDs as they’re popularly known in the youth community. The purpose of GD is to sieve out interested candidates from those who’re not interested. There’re two modes, either a single topic is given to speak on else two or more are given and the candidates decide among themselves on which topic they’ll speak. To make a good impression in a GD you must: Tips for Interviews  Tips for GD: Listen to topic carefully, when it is being spoken, it is a good habit to write down the topic on a piece of paper. Thereafter try to create a rough structure by scribbling draft on the aforesaid paper. On most occasions you’ll be given some time to think before you’re instructed to start discussing. It is always a plus point if you can start the proceedings, i.e. become the ice breaker and give a hue to the discussion fore with.  On most occasions person who speaks first sets the tone of the interview, unless and until it is blatantly wrong. Therefore, idea is to set the tone of the entire discussion. Even if you’re not among the one who takes the initiative, make it a point to speak either second or third. Though a fact has to keep in mind, whenever you speak, kindly refrain from speaking impromptu or just for the sake of saying. Make points in the discussion around various aspects of the topics, taking a stand. Try to create an opinion in your group. Make your presence felt among your peers. See if they’re taking your points in a just manner and supporting your arguments. Avoid too much aggression and keep the pitch and loudness of your voice in check for female and male candidates respectively. I personally feel, you must avoid playing the role of a moderator in a group, many people think it is beneficial, and sometimes they’re even rewarded, but again my personal belief is negative. Please avoid interrupting when your peer is making an argument. Also, avoid nullifying anyone’s argument unless and until you’ve strong proofs to verify your claim. If that is not the case, ignore. If possible and you think that your peers are congenial enough, you must try to sum up the entire discussion and conclude the discussion with a consensual answer. These points if followed will definitely help you to sail through the Group Discussion process. However, you need to do some serious homework before you’ve to appear for a group discussion. Make sure you’re well versed in various current affairs. Also, you may write a page or two on various GD topics which are easily available online. It’ll help you to structure your argument and make an everlasting impression on the assessor. GD topics are different and they depend on kind of interview process, i.e. for job it will more generic, whereas for B-School it’ll be more focused. All the Best!   Source: Youth4Work.com

Stanford study finds walking improves creativity

Stanford researchers found that walking boosts creative inspiration. They examined creativity levels of people while they walked versus while they sat. A person's creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when walking.

BY MAY WONG

L.A. Cicero

Many people claim they do their best thinking while walking. A new study finds that walking indeed boosts creative inspiration.

Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, was known for his walking meetings. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has also been seen holding meetings on foot. And perhaps you've paced back and forth on occasion to drum up ideas.

A new study by Stanford researchers provides an explanation for this.

Creative thinking improves while a person is walking and shortly thereafter, according to a study co-authored by Marily Oppezzo, a Stanford doctoral graduate in educational psychology, and Daniel Schwartz, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

The study found that walking indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration. The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor. Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.

"Many people anecdotally claim they do their best thinking when walking. We finally may be taking a step, or two, toward discovering why," Oppezzo and Schwartz wrote in the study published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.

Walking vs. sitting

Other research has focused on how aerobic exercise generally protects long-term cognitive function, but until now, there did not appear to be a study that specifically examined the effect of non-aerobic walking on the simultaneous creative generation of new ideas and then compared it against sitting, Oppezzo said.

A person walking indoors – on a treadmill in a room facing a blank wall – or walking outdoors in the fresh air produced twice as many creative responses compared to a person sitting down, one of the experiments found.

"I thought walking outside would blow everything out of the water, but walking on a treadmill in a small, boring room still had strong results, which surprised me," Oppezzo said.

The study also found that creative juices continued to flow even when a person sat back down shortly after a walk.

Gauging creative thinking

The research comprised four experiments involving 176 college students and other adults who completed tasks commonly used by researchers to gauge creative thinking. Participants were placed in different conditions: walking indoors on a treadmill or sitting indoors – both facing a blank wall – and walking outdoors or sitting outdoors while being pushed in wheelchair – both along a pre-determined path on the Stanford campus. Researchers put seated participants in a wheelchair outside to present the same kind of visual movement as walking.

Different combinations, such as two consecutive seated sessions, or a walking session followed by a seated one, were also compared. The walking or sitting sessions used to measure creativity lasted anywhere from 5 to 16 minutes, depending on the tasks being tested.

Three of the experiments relied on a "divergent thinking" creativity test. Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. In these experiments, participants had to think of alternate uses for a given object. They were given several sets of three objects and had four minutes to come up with as many responses as possible for each set. A response was considered novel if no other participant in the group used it. Researchers also gauged whether a response was appropriate. For example, a "tire" could not be used as a pinkie ring.

The overwhelming majority of the participants in these three experiments were more creative while walking than sitting, the study found. In one of those experiments, participants were tested indoors – first while sitting, then while walking on a treadmill. The creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when the person was walking, according to the study.

A fourth experiment evaluated creative output by measuring people's abilities to generate complex analogies to prompt phrases. The most creative responses were those that captured the deep structure of the prompt. For example, for the prompt "a robbed safe," a response of "a soldier suffering from PTSD" captures the sense of loss, violation and dysfunction. "An empty wallet" does not.

The result: 100 percent of those who walked outside were able to generate at least one high-quality, novel analogy compared to 50 percent of those seated inside.

No link to focused thinking

But not all thought processes are equal. While the study showed that walking benefited creative brainstorming, it did not have a positive effect on the kind of focused thinking required for single, correct answers.

"This isn't to say that every task at work should be done while simultaneously walking, but those that require a fresh perspective or new ideas would benefit from it," said Oppezzo, now an adjunct faculty member at Santa Clara University.

Researchers gave participants a word-association task, commonly used to measure insight and focused thinking. Given three words, participants had to generate the one word that could be used with all three to form compound words. For instance, given the words "cottage, Swiss and cake," the correct answer is "cheese."

In this test, those who responded while walking performed mildly worse than those who responded while sitting, according to the study.

Productive creativity involves a series of steps – from idea generation to execution – and the research, Oppezzo said, demonstrated that the benefits of walking applied to the "divergent" element of creative thinking, but not to the more "convergent" or focused thinking characteristic of insight.

"We're not saying walking can turn you into Michelangelo," Oppezzo said. "But it could help you at the beginning stages of creativity."

The study's strong findings will have legs, leading to further research on the neurological and physiological pathways, Schwartz predicts.

"There's work to be done to find out the causal mechanisms," Schwartz said. "And this is a very robust paradigm that will allow people to begin manipulations, so they can track down how the body is influencing the mind."

One possible future research issue: Is it walking per se or do other forms of mild physical activity have similar elevating effects?

In the meantime, "we already know that physical activity is important and sitting too often is unhealthy. This study is another justification for integrating bouts of physical activity into the day, whether it's recess at school or turning a meeting at work into a walking one," Oppezzo said. "We'd be healthier, and maybe more innovative for it."

Source: Stanford.edu

CV Dos and Don'ts

CV Dos and Don'ts

It takes at least two days to write a superb new application, addressing the issues and organising the information so that you sell yourself. The biggest error most people make is throwing away a great chance by rushing a mediocre CV out at the last minute. Regard your CV and application letter as work in progress and give it a polish every couple of months. You never know when you will be asked for it. As a professional CV writer I have known people return to the same agencies that had previously refused them, this time with a great application that gets them noticed. The difference between managing your career and just letting it happen can be more than the cost of your home over the course of a lifetime. You need to take this task seriously right from the start. You do not need to be headlining the trivial details of your life like your address and what primary school you went to. You do not need to tell someone that the document is a CV. For each occupation and each level of each occupation and for changes of career and country there are key things you need to be saying that recruiters want to hear. If you already know enough then spend some time listing these key things before you ever start writing your application. If you need more information, then start collecting it, start finding out what buzzwords, concepts and competencies that will carry conviction. If you follow a boring format or copy out your job definition it will be dull as ditchwater to recruiters who have to read lots of applications every day. You need to reach these people where they get interested. The story of your career needs to build up expectations that you are worth meeting. You need to tell them the context in which your achievements have taken place and let them know what value you offer for the future. Enter the page content here. Do not pepper your CV with titles like PROFILE, CAREER OBJECTIVE and SKILLS unless you want to appear like someone who has slavishly followed a template. You can have an introduction to your CV but there's no need to label it. All you really need is a few sensible headings such as PROFESSIONAL, CAREER and PERSONAL - under which you can group your skills/qualifications, narrative of achievements and necessary details. Bulleted paragraphs are a great way to save space and add impact but they need to be congruent. They need to relate to the one before and the one after in an intelligent way. Lists of superlative claims with no substantiating evidence cannot be understood in context and cut no ice with anyone. The medium is in the message. If they have reached the third paragraph of your letter and glanced at your CV, you have already shown them that you can communicate. There is no need to tell them you are a GOOD COMMUNICATOR, a SELF-STARTER or a GREAT TEAM PLAYER in so many words. It needs to be implicit in your account of yourself, not stuffed under their nose as a grandiose claim. People who do that look naive; people who get good jobs come across as mature enough to know how to say things that matter about the real issues involved. People cannot help but be impressed by talented design and clever typesetting. Your choice of fonts and styles, however, is somewhat limited by the restrictions of email and online CV Builders. You need to find out what these restrictions are by studying the word processing program you are using and asking yourself: how can I be sure that my fonts and format arrive on the reader's computer the same way they left here? If you want to make a subtle and sophisticated impression you need to start finding out about the technicalities by actually reading the help files and manuals you have so far taken for granted. Your letter needs to sing, summarise, promise, capture the spirit of what's best about you. Safe, boring, over-length, repetitive letters that regurgitate your CV or try to match every single minor point in the job definition will have one damaging effect on the reader - they will think you are not very bright. Professional writers throw away more stuff than they publish; put it all down and then reduce it until you fit two pages. If necessary group your entire EARLY CAREER under a separate heading and just give each job a line or two. Place the focus on the last 5-10 years and the highest levels of activity and achievement. Cut the minor roles and competencies which are already implied by the big stuff you do. Write your brief and powerful introduction last; when you know what you need to say to summarise your offering, and don't bother giving it a heading anyone can see what it is.             Source: Monster

When Your Salary Makes You Too Expensive

Q: What can I do when my salary history makes me really expensive in my current job market? I don't want to take a huge salary cut, but I am not having success interviewing. A: Ironically, years of experience or having valuable expertise can sometimes put you in a tough spot and leave you feeling frustrated and discouraged. You cannot control where your salary history places you in the job market in your geographic location - other than to move. On the other hand, there are some actions you can take that may help: * Find out if the reason why employers are reluctant to interview you is related to your salary history, as you assume. You may be right, but there might be other reasons, too. In any case, the best way to gather this information is to persist in asking for it. * Since you may not get an interview if the employer uses salary history as a screen, try different ways to get in front of their key decision makers. Perhaps through networking or informational interviews, you may find a receptive senior-level contact. In that case, you can use that personal meeting to directly address their concerns about your compensation expectations, impress and interest them in your skills, and turn them into an advocate in the interview process. * Try to target your job search on those companies who pay higher than the norm for your position. These might be local offices of multinational companies, or in an industry that has to pay more to attract talent (such as high-tech firms).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Source: http://content.monsterindia.com/ic1.html?acid=425