A coaching client asked me recently how she could “create more time” for her personal and professional interests. While we all have the same twenty-four hours in a day, the way we use that time varies wildly. Here are four great tips for getting more out of the time you have!

1. Clearly define what your priorities are for each day. Writing them out increases the chances exponentially that the most important things will get done.
2. Understand what your compelling purpose is for achieving a specific result. Doing this simple association turns a “nice to have” into a “Non Negotiable” result. If a result or action doesn’t have a compelling purpose attached to it, that result or action cannot be a priority for you.
3. Get proactive. The average American worker spends three to four hours a day on email. At the risk of driving readers away from my own email announcements, limit your email. I answer personal business email in three fifteen-minute time chunks per day. Quitting all-day email must be like quitting heroin, but you must do it to create more time for yourself.
4. Find partners and make them a part of your team. I love my bookkeeper Chris because she updates my financial reports every other month. In the past, I’d spend three to four hours every month updating QuickBooks myself. That took me away from my job as the creativity specialist and visionary for my company. Updating my financial ledger was mindless, painless, and the exact opposite of what I do to serve clients and stay in business!

Try these out for thirty days and see what happens to your business. We all spend far too much time being reactive in life, whether it’s personally or professionally. The key to time management is to take control where you can. This trains your mind and body to be more judicious with your time, and more focused on the activities that create wealth and fulfillment.

Mike Faber is an award-winning sales professional, business leader, and television personality. He’s also a speaker and certified professional coach who has taught thousands of business leaders to communicate passionately and effectively. Mike brings the lessons of a 30-year career in sales, management, and broadcasting to audiences in a style that combines humor, candor, and lessons that can be applied to all walks of life.

Well, it’s the time of year for “best of” and “Top 10″ lists, so in honor of the brand new 2010, we thought we’d share a run-down of the most popular training topics our clients are planning for this upcoming year:

1. Behavioral Interviewing
There is nothing more important than hiring the right people. Hiring the right person for the right job provides tremendous organizational benefits by increasing employee productivity, reducing training time, and controlling the high cost of employee turnover—not to mention the positive impact on team morale. You’d think, with double-digit unemployment rates across the country, that it would be easy to hire right now…right? Well, maybe. Read more…

2. Business Writing
Many experts estimate that as much as 90% of human communication comes from non-verbal clues such as voice inflection and body language. In business writing, however, you have only the words to get your meaning across, so the way the writer uses those words becomes more important. On-the-job writing matters—to your company, to your readers, and to you as a writer. From sales proposals to client emails to internal communications, your employees represent your organization every time they write an email or craft a document. Read more…

3. Coaching/Mentoring
Coaching can help managers and supervisors provide a structure for enabling their employees to achieve high performance. But the bewildering array of both available resources and management duties can complicate the process. What situations call for coaching vs. counseling? What’s the difference in coaching and performance management? How exactly do you give constructive feedback? Read more…

4. DiSC
There are, of course, many different assessment tools that rate behavior, preference, attitudes, etc. and provide a framework for understanding the way in which you see the world and the differing ways in which others may approach the same set of facts or circumstances. Myers-Briggs/MBTI, Emergenetics, Lominger, Insights and many others remain popular, but the most common tool we see clients utilizing is the DiSC. Read more…

5. Emotional Intelligence/EQ
All managers can relate horror stories about employees or team members who were clearly intelligent, technically capable, and able to perform the duties their job demanded…and who wreaked havoc on their teams because their social skills or self-management capability was lacking. When it comes to individual and team success, IQ is not enough; in fact, the skill set known as Emotional Intelligence (EQ) has consistently proven to be a better indicator of workplace success. Read more…

6. Facilitation Skills
Most of us feel like we spend too much time in meetings. Meetings that are too long. Meetings that have too many participants. Meetings that don’t have clear objectives. Meetings that get sidetracked by off-topic discussions. Meetings can be a waste of time…but with an effective facilitator, that doesn’t have to be the case. Read more…

7. Harassment Prevention/Respectful Work Environment
Even when training budgets are tight, harassment prevention and awareness remains a topic of interest to many organizations due to the legal liability issues that can be involved. Ensuring that both individual contributors and managers understand the policies/procedures and responsibilities of the organization is essential, but may not be enough. Read more…

8. Networking Skills
Networking…it isn’t just for salespeople! Although for many people the word “networking” conjures up a cringe-inducing image of a pushy salesperson shoving a business card into every hand she can find, the reality is that networking is about serving as a resource—about giving, not taking—and it’s essential for both individual and organizational success. Read more…

9. Project Management
In past years, much of the project management training offered by organizations was geared towards those employees who were planning to become a Project Management Professional (PMP) and whose job title or function specifically encompassed a formal project management role. Today, however, we see organizations recognizing that many employees manage projects (albeit on a less formal basis) and recognizing the benefits of a project management overview. Read more…

10. Work-Life Balance/Stress Management
It goes without saying that the state of the economy, mass layoffs, and ever-increasing demands on our employees’ time creates a perfect storm of stress. The negative impacts of stress can range from the physical to the mental and can have devastating impacts on both individuals and teams. Organizations are exploring a variety of resources they can offer to help weather the storm. Read more…

Wishing you an excellent and productive 2010!

Ashley Andrus is President of Zoe Training & Consulting. Her passion is making HR folks and meeting planners look like *rock stars* by providing one-stop access to 90+ speakers, trainers, facilitators, coaches, and consultants.

With the “Where the Wild Things Are” movie taking the box office by storm it’s a good time to think about feral learning and the ways in which Training & Development are taking a walk on “the wild side.”

In today’s “Google World” it’s possible to find instructions and information on almost anything you might need.

• Looking for that new BBQ restaurant? Google it.
• Wondering how many Rocky movies are in the series? A few keystrokes, a click, and voila.
• Need to know how to change out the filter in your furnace? You know what to do.

Most of us search online every single day. For 2009, Google reports a little under 300 million searches per day on average—almost 9 billion searches in the month of September alone. Technology has changed—forever—the way we gather information. The question is whether your organization’s training & development model has effectively adapted to that reality.

In the P.G. (pre-Google) days, the standard people development model was all “push.” Show and Tell. The company set the framework and the timeline. Both the content (the ‘what’ employees needed to know) and the time frame (the ‘when’ they got it) was determined by the organization. On-the-job learning was still taking place, of course, but without the speed and depth that the internet has made possible.

Over the last decade we’ve seen many organizations shift towards employee-driven development, in which the individual employees have a stake and a say in their own individual development plans. A recent google search for “personal learning environment” returned more than 280 million results, while “Training 2.0″ garnered 105 million. This attitude, in conjunction with technological advances, has resulted in a huge efficacy leap in the ability of learners to figure out what they need to know and to actively seek that precise information.

The result? Feral learning. The term “feral learning” was coined in the 1990s by Ted Nunan, perhaps, or by Dr. Roy Lundin (see here for an overview of the history of the term) with regard to the increasing trend by students of using the Internet to supplement formal curricula, to learn from other learners, and to adapt on the fly to situational changes.

Many K-12 and post-secondary school systems are actively experimenting with ways to more fully integrate this collaborative learning environment into 21st century classrooms (see a thought-provoking video here and an overview on how the Internet is tearing down classroom walls here.) It can be more difficult to incorporate into corporate culture (see here for some potential pitfalls in the realm of employee-driven development) but it’s here to stay and smart organizations are identifying ways to blend “push” content with “pull” capabilities.

3.5 tips for putting this trend to work for your organization:

1. HELP YOUR EMPLOYEES BECOME BETTER LEARNERS. In addition to providing the technology to access online resources, help them refine their “human Google search terms” to more effectively gather info from co-workers. Help them understand how to better gather information internally and externally through social networking, both online and in-person. As networking expert Sarah Michel notes, “in the 21st Century your network is your netWORTH™”…do your employees know how to utilize their networks on the job to help the organization accomplish its objectives?

2. HELP YOUR EMPLOYEES BECOME BETTER TEACHERS AND MENTORS. All organizations are being asked to do more with less. Therefore it’s critical to give your employees appropriate tools and techniques so they can serve as a resource for others without negatively impacting their own job performance. Todd Hudson’s excellent peer mentoring program is an example of a framework that works for organizations from copper mines to call centers with regard to effectively on-boarding new employees AND for helping existing employees tap into the knowledge that those new employees bring in with them.

3. IDENTIFY WHICH CRITICAL AREAS ARE SUITABLE FOR “PULL” LEARNING and which you still need to offer as “push” programs. There isn’t a single structure that’s right for all organizations. Your ideal training structure depends on a variety of factors. Hone your offerings and make them timely and relevant.

3.5 OFFER THAT CONTENT IN MULTI-MEDIA FORMATS. Face-to-face is excellent for some topics and some learners; some people hate podcasts and prefer to read. Offering your internal learners a variety of media from which to choose enhances the likelihood of information transfer…

…which is the point, after all.

Ashley Andrus is President of Zoe Training & Consulting. Her passion is making HR folks and meeting planners look like *rock stars* by providing one-stop access to 90+ speakers, trainers, facilitators, coaches, and consultants.

Choosing to work from home as an entrepreneur in the coaching and professional speaking business has been the single most freeing, and terrifying decision of my work career. At first, the “flight from cubicle” life seemed idyllic: I could wake up when I wanted to, pursue exactly what made me happy, and move from the office to home in a matter of seconds. No more battling traffic on the freeway at rush-hour! Reality started to hit as time passed, along with the first and third of every month. Instead of a comforting pay-stub in the mail, all I saw were bills. The cubicle seemed like a prison when I worked at my last company, now it beckoned like a siren’s call. I had to make a choice — get active and engaged in my new career, or start looking for another six-by-eight cube to call home.

By this time, early 2005 for me, I had far too much invested to go back to the cubes. Chances are you do too! A 2000 study* by the US Small Business Association reported that 46 percent of home-based businesses use personal funds for start-up capital!

I looked around for ideas on how to charge up my career and get “back in the game.” Problem was, in corporate life, I’d really never been in the game at all. The networks I’d established and the support groups I leveraged were within my company. Once I left, those groups broke apart like a Kleenex caught in the dryer. Oh yeah, working at home gives me time to do many, many loads of laundry. How could I avoid getting stuck in the lint basket of professional life? Like many answers, they were right in front of me, in the stories my coaching clients told me of their entrepreneurial successes and failures.

Based on thousands of coaching sessions over a fifteen-year coaching career, here are the five key components of entrepreneurial business success.

1. Don’t wait for others to help you; help them. While working solo can feel like a lonely voyage, you are not alone! Challenges that crop up for the first, or hundredth time, have been faced and conquered by others. Share your insights with peers, and then ask for their help where you need it. Form a “mastermind” group to meet frequently; you can even do it over a pot-luck lunch or supper. Ask that each member bring one success to crow about and one challenge that seems insurmountable. Brain-storm solutions with each other and be ready to take action.

2. Think Big! I coach a life insurance saleswoman and she’s considering whether to hire an assistant. The most successful agents in her company have full-time assistants, but she’s afraid of committing to pay someone else on her already thin budget. Instead of hiring someone full time, our shared insight came up with starting an intern program in her practice, leveraging local college students majoring in business. That saves my client money and helps her contribute to a young person’s future success.

3. Break through plateaus. How often have you experienced some short-term success, and then decided that it was okay to “cruise” a bit? That’s like celebrating five days of healthy eating by going out on Saturday night and inhaling a large pizza pie yourself. Create a list of your five most productive business-building activities and post that list in the most prominent places you can think of. Doing these activities is non-negotiable; as integral to your business’ health as brushing your teeth and flossing is to your dental health. Here are the “top five” I’ve developed for my speaking and coaching career.

• Write an article a week for publication.
• Make five new or “renewed” (see Action #4) contacts a day.
• Spend thirty minutes a day on marketing and Internet strategic updates.
• Offer my support to one professional colleague per day.
• Perform one act of gratitude per day.

What’s on your list? Consistency of action is the key to success! Once you’ve determined your “top five,” get after them like a dog after a juicy steak.

4. Your best new clients may be your “old” clients. How often do you update your current clients on what’s new with you, your industry, and your community? Start to view yourself as your existing customer’s lifeline to breaking information and the latest trends in your area of expertise. If you’ve immersed yourself in your career, then you are the expert in their eyes. Reach out to folks you’ve done business with before and “renew” their allegiance to you. Assess their current needs just like you did when they first purchased your product or service. Remember to ask for referrals!

5. Choose to be fearless. Before I embarked on my coaching career, I looked up the local life coaching professional organization on the Internet. Randomly, I chose to call a past president and asked to buy her coffee and hear her story. Laurie and I met at a bagel place in town, and for the price of coffee and a muffin, she shared priceless insight on what she loved and what frustrated her about coaching. Her generosity of spirit was always there, but had I not called a stranger out of the blue, I never would have known.

You can choose to chart a professional course entirely on your own. If you do, I salute you and wish you well. What I have found is that leveraging a diverse group of people and ideas is the single most important factor in whether a home-based entrepreneur succeeds or fails. That, and your hard work and focus on the five key components of small business success, will keep you far away from the cubes!

Mike Faber is an award-winning sales professional, business leader, and television personality. He’s also a speaker and certified professional coach who has taught thousands of business leaders to communicate passionately and effectively. Mike brings the lessons of a 30-year career in sales, management, and broadcasting to audiences in a style that combines humor, candor, and lessons that can be applied to all walks of life.