Your Inner CEO: Confidence, man! Confidence!

There’s something inherently heroic about being in business for yourself. It’s the romance of risk taking and the refusal to compromise your dreams for the sake of security. There are also some less purely philosophical rewards for entrepreneurship. As your own boss you can set your own hours. You can take a day off or even a vacation whenever you want. And whatever profits the business makes belong to you alone.

That’s the upside. The not-so-upside is the huge amount of work it takes in order to achieve success. Research shows that most entrepreneurs put in far more than the standard forty hour week. And just as you get the credit (and the profits) for everything that goes right, you also get the blame (and the loss) for whatever goes wrong. So entrepreneurship is definitely not for sissies. The vast majority of entrepreneurs fail before they succeed. There will be lots of false starts before you cross the finish line.

Reserve energy is essential. It’s the ability to keep trying even when you’ve tried and failed. It’s also the power to see when the time has come to let go and try something else. Both those qualities are rare, but the second may be even more unusual than the first.

Not everyone is cut out to play in the National Basketball Association -- especially guys who are five foot nine. Lots of people sing in the shower, but only a few will sing for the Metropolitan Opera. Thinking about this, you will enter a murky area in which inner and outer reality ram into each other. It can be hard to exchange an impractical dream for a more feasible one, doing that is not the same thing as surrender. It may mean learning from your mistakes. It may or may not mean giving up on a certain undertaking, but it means never giving up on yourself.

Having said that, when you do make a promise from the heart -- especially to yourself – many, many worthy goals are achievable regardless of the evidence of the moment. 

It may not happen immediately. In fact, it probably won’t. You’ll make mistakes in your business, in your relationships, and in all other areas of your life. Setbacks are going to happen in. Some of them will be your responsibility. Other times someone else may be at fault. But blame and a victim mentality just waste time and energy. 

Confidence is knowing that you will succeed. If it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow.  If it doesn't come with this project, it will come with the next one. Confidence is knowing that you can acquire whatever skills and knowledge you do not yet possess.  It is knowing that you are capable of working hard and are tenacious enough to go the distance, however far that may be. It is knowing that as much as you appreciate the cheerleaders in your life, that you would keep going even if nobody believed in you, And sometimes nobody will believe in you. You can be confident of that.

Your Inner CEO: Are you the life of the party?

Do you enjoy being in the company of people you work with? That can be a good way of knowing whether they enjoy being with you.

Marlon Brando was once asked if he considered himself the best actor in Hollywood. That was a very treacherous question, but Brando managed to answer it in a creative way. He said, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m the best actor. I’m the best positioned actor. People know me, and they want me around. I make life interesting for the people around me. It’s fun for me and it’s fun for them. I’m not always a nice guy, but I’m never the same guy twice. That’s why studios want to put me in movies, and that why the public wants to see me there.”

Are you like Brando in this respect? Do you get together with people in your industry even when you don’t have to? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track, If the answer is no, ask yourself who would you rather be with? Then think about how you can make a career move in that direction.

If you have a difference of opinion with someone, do you feel you always need to win? If so, choose your words carefully. How you express yourself will be remembered long after what you said is forgotten. And remember the key phrase” “Let’s keep talking.”

If someone is the target of another person’s anger, do you instinctively take one person’s side? Don’t rush to judgment. There are two sides to any dispute -- and there’s also the very wise option of not getting involved if you don’t have to.

I’m not saying you should hang around the water cooler. I’m saying you should take a genuine interest in other people – and genuine is the key word. Don’t fake it. Train yourself to actually become interested in other people’s lives. You yourself are of course totally fascinating -- but that doesn’t mean you’re the only one who’s totally fascinating. Show people you understand that!

Your Inner CEO: Who's laughing now?

What's the the single greatest accomplishment of your career? It can be something you did for your company, or something you did for yourself, or maybe even something you did to outfox the competition.

To understand "greatest career accomplishment," let's pretend you're our old friend Bill Gates. Take a stroll through your 48,000 square foot home near Seattle, and ponder the question:what’s the best thing you’ve done in your work and career. 

In terms of business decision making, certainly one of your highlights was licensing your computer operating system to IBM for almost no money -- provided you could retain the right to license the system to other computer manufacturers as well. IBM was happy to agree -- because nobody would possibly want to compete with the most powerful company in the world, right? 

With that one decision, your system and your company became the dominant throughout the world, and you, Bill Gates, were on your way to a net worth of more than sixty billion dollars.

Now let's pretend you're another of our old friends, the late Steve Jobs. As if it were the mirror image of Bill Gates' strategic ploy, your decision early on not to allow the licensing of your operating system was for many years regarded as one of the stupidest acts in the whole history of human commerce. And yet, as time passed and Apple eventually produced a whole line of blockbuster products, your proprietary move hugely paid off. Go figure!

Sometimes it's really hard to tell what works and what doesn't, if we look at a career simply from a profit-making point of view. So try looking at your greatest career achievement from a different angle. Instead of focusing on a decision that helped you make so much money, maybe you’d like to look at the decision to give so much of it away. 

After all, no other person in history has become a philanthropist on the scale of Bill Gates. Nations in Africa and Asia are receiving billions of dollars in medical and educational support. This may not be as luxurious as your big house on Lake Washington with its digitalized works of art, but it’s certainly something to be proud of.

The process of determining your greatest career achievement is a very personal decision. It can be something obvious or it can be something very subtle. But it should make you proud of yourself when you think of. it. Maybe it's something you did many years ago. Or maybe it's something you'll do today.

Perfect Pitch: "Does anyone have a question?"

I have some background in standup comedy, and the ability to talk well in front of an audience has always fascinated me. What’s especially interesting is how a speaker handles hostility. 

This doesn’t come only from “hecklers” in comedy clubs. You can encounter this anywhere, whether it’s a middle school parents meeting or a corporate board of directors.

Whenever you speak in front of a group of people, you’re continually trying to win them over to our way of thinking. That’s especially true when taking questions. So what’s the best way to go about this?

The first step in responding to a question should be to understand what’s on the person’s mind and looking for a common ground of agreement. Answers flow easily when you and the questioner are in sync and when you display a sincere interest in what that person is trying to express. This sincere interest will have a far more lasting impression than any content of what you say. Yet the tendency is to unload your own opinions before you do anything else.

Flat out defiance of a hostile questioner is always a difficult temptation to overcome. Once you’ve entered that mode, it’s very hard to get out of it. Later you may feel that the stance you adopted was ill advised, but for the moment you’ll be stuck with it. So don’t go there in the first place. Think about what you’re doing and saying rather than just reacting to what’s being said to you.

One of the greatest mistakes you can make is to lose your composure in a pressure situation – especially you’re talking about important issues. Even if your outward composure doesn’t obviously falter, you never want it give even a hint that you have anything but the highest confidence in your ideas, in your ability to present them, and in yourself.

So how is that confidence displayed? Being brash and defensive
sends exactly the wrong message. Be firm and forceful, but also
face the challenge of being open when you’re uncertain about a
specific point. There are times when “I just don’t know” is the best
answer – especially when it’s obvious that you really don’t.

Your Inner CEO: Learning To Like Yourself

Eleanor Roosevelt said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." Jerry Lewis, in his great film The Nutty Professor, put it another way: "You might as well learn to like yourself, because you're going to be spending a lot of time with you."

Many of us -- even the most financially successful -- carry around a mental suitcase full of negative messages about ourselves. They may have originated with parents, teachers, bosses, colleagues, or even our own imaginations. But we always have the capacity to reframe those messages and make positive beliefs our conscious choice.

Sometimes we get positive pictures of ourselves from others. Hold on to them! You might want to start a folder or notebook to collect acknowledgments, thank-you notes, good reviews, positive evaluations, and other tangible evidence of your abilities. As you’re compiling these positive messages, also take time to identify negative beliefs that can be undermining your sense of self.

Here’s a suggestion. Write down four self-criticisms or negative beliefs that may be affecting you. Then adjust those negatives to reflect a more positive, accepting view of yourself or the situation. Support your new, positive view with specific evidence.

For example, you may have a negative belief that you’re a disorganized person. Actually, you may be very organized. You just have an awful lot to do.

So you might write something like this: “Last week, in addition to my other responsibilities, I planned a new software implementation. I ran a meeting, revised 12 documents, made 53 calls. It takes plenty of organization to coordinate all that!”

As Debra Benton wrote in her book Lions Don't Need To Roar, "Life is a series of relationships, and business is a series of relationships with money attached." In business, and in life, we are constantly challenged to work with and through other people. But it can be very difficult to work with others when your own negative opinions of yourself get in the way.

Your Inner CEO: Can we talk? Or shall we just email?

In any industry today there are two basic ways of opening a connection with potential clients or customers. One of them – cold calling – has been around for a long time. The other possibility, which is communicating by email, is obviously much newer. But it’s becoming the more widely used.

There’s a simple reason why email has become a key element in developing new business. It’s because most people hate to make cold calls. So they rely on email as an introduction to break the ice. But, although email may be easier, it’s often the less effective of the two techniques.

Still, if you’re going to use email you should learn to do it right. So let’s see exactly what that involves.

First and foremost, before you send an email to a potential customer you need to answer these questions:

Are you sending the email in order to avoid making a call?

Is e-mail your choice because it lets you avoid the rejection that you risk in cold calls?

Will you wait for a return e-mail before moving the process forward with a call?

There’s a basically defensive psychology that underlies these questions. Anticipating rejection makes people turn to e-mail to generate new connections. They think it will hurt less to never get a an email reply than to actually hear the word "no." That’s not a good mindset to have.

Another reason for “call reluctance” is the strong possibility of getting blocked by gatekeepers or voicemail. You might think, "Forget it -- it's not worth the aggravation and energy. I'll just e-mail instead."

But if use e-mail to offer your product or service to someone who doesn't know you, you can't establish a dialogue. You can’t build the trust that’s needed for a productive long-term relationship You can’t reach that crucial point of “Let’s keep talking” because you never start talking in the first place.

I suggest thinking of e-mail as your last resort. Trust me: you can learn to pick up the phone without fear, start a trusting conversation with a gatekeeper, learn how to go beyond voice mail, and reach the decision-maker. Go for it. As the late Vic Braden, the great tennis coach, used to say, “You’ll be famous by Friday!”

A Kick in the Career: You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Work Here. Or Maybe You Do

Are all visionaries nuts? Do all highly successful people have a screw loose? Is the derangement that goes with thinking way outside box the same thing that creates a windfall for the shareholders?

One thing is for sure: not everybody who’s nuts is a genius. Some people are just plain bananas. We might be hanging onto a romantic notion that all out-of-the-blue success stories are the products of tenacious crazy people who push their vision through even if their toxic or anti-social behavior drives everyone around them bonkers. It’s all part of the deal when it comes to making it in business, right? Troubling, perhaps, but it will help me market my new book series Ayn Rand, Vampire Hunter.

Maybe this stereotype is kept alive by the business community in order to maintain an illusion that success is a corrupting influence. After all, nothing thins the herd of competition like a belief that getting to the top isn’t worth it. Or maybe we are strangely hard-wired to respect and respond to a certain level of insanity. In the public imagination, genius typically comes with a personality somewhere between Joseph Stalin and the dude from A Beautiful Mind. Just ask any movie actor who has been put through seventy-two punishing takes by a visionary cinematic despot: it is exhausting, but it’s part of working with Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick.

Are there no even-tempered geniuses out there? Surely we all have had great bosses who could have made the choice to be nasty, but instead took the time to relate to their employees on a human level. Clint Eastwood, by all accounts, runs the quietest, most respectful movie set in the business, albeit at gunpoint. (Kidding, Clint, kidding!). Countless people have gotten very, very rich while at the same time being as even keeled as they can be. It’s just that they don’t make good copy. People who got where they are by hard work and forgetting to take their medication are just more interesting.

I'll say it again. There are plenty of crazy people whose ideas are just crazy. It seems reasonable to assume that nutcases with delusional visions of grandeur exist in equal numbers to geniuses. Institutions and sidewalks are full of unfortunates who claim to have developed a way to communicate with an alien species through their fillings. Actually, this might be their time. I’ll bet people on Kickstarter would shell out to see the beta testing on that prototype.  Crazy as it sounds. 

A Kick in the Career: Results of Your Online Celebrity Quiz Are In!

Comparing yourself to celebrities and characters in books or movies seems to be all the rage on the Internet these days. A series of simple, personality-test questions and voila! You know exactly which real-life or fictional being has the most in common with you.

Personally, I don’t understand the need to compare myself to anyone else, but that’s only because I compare myself to my wife and kids all the time and still keep coming up short. However, it didn’t stop me from preparing this handy guide for you. Now, when you’re entering an important interview, or even if you are on the other side of the desk, you can get a bead on what you have to offer in clever pop culture format.

Gwyneth Paltrow: Your penchant for unique baby names demonstrates your out-of-the box thinking. Your level of compassion when breaking up with a rock star tells a potential employer that you would be loyal, and would put a great deal of thought into whether or not to leave them in the lurch.

Benedict Cumberbatch – Your skill at playing Sherlock Holmes has led you to be a formidable interview subject. You’re able to tell where your prospective employer has been in the last 24 hours by examining the miniscule fiber residue on his or slacks. Your ridiculous name proves that you put yourself out there unashamedly. You stand behind who you are, no matter how many times people ask you whether you’ve just introduced yourself with the name of a carrot patch inhabitant in a Beatrix Potter story.

Matthew McConaughey -  Your intensity is an acquired taste. But once your new boss gets used to the fact that your ability to come off like a psychotic and potentially violent sociopath is an asset to the workplace, all will be well.

Miley Cyrus – You are not afraid to court controversy, so you have the potential to take great risks on behalf of your company that could yield big returns. However, some time will have to be taken to explain the difference between working and twerking.

Oprah – You have the capacity to build an empire out of telling those who will never possess what you do how to empower themselves. If that is not worth a top salary at a Fortune 500 company, I don’t know what is.

Pope Francis – Though you are a champion of the underprivileged, you also take a hard line on issues that are important to the people you represent. If you can be kept from leading a hoard of angry workers into the CEO’s office to demand better treatment, you could be a valuable asset to the vision of the organization.

Kim Kardashian – If your physical appearance is any indication, you have shown the world that you can get a lot of work done.

Justin Bieber –Many brushes with the law clearly mark you as a rebel, which could present danger for an employer. However, you have around 50 million Twitter followers, so your power to bring the company’s message to a huge market share could make you worth the risk. After all, if an extra 50 million people can learn of a new product launch thanks to you, our spin doctors can deal with a little blowback from punching the police officer who found you with a brick of hash in your Mazerati.

George Lucas – Your ability to create a brand is among the most admirable in the whole history of capitalism. Any company would be glad to have your expertise in that area. However, your tendency to let Walt Disney carry on your legacy could be a sign of low self-esteem that would need to be addressed over the long term.

Beyonce – You’re hired.

Perfect Pitch: "Let's Stop Talking"

"Let's keep talking" is a very positive phrase to use in many business interactions. But there's also a point when you need to stop talking for a while. 

Some people find it very hard to notice the arrival of that point. They just keep circling around it. Or they suddenly see that the conversational connection is weakening, and they just disappear. They either go on too long, or stop too abruptly. 

Even in five minutes of pure talking a speaker is very apt to cover so much ground that at the close the listeners are hazy about all the main points. That's especially true in public presentations, regardless of whether the audience is large or small. You may assume that their points are crystal clear in the minds of the listeners. After all they’re crystal clear to you. But you may have been working with these ideas for weeks or months. Yet they’re new to the audience. 

For this reason, one of the worst communication mistakes you can make is talking too long. It doesn't matter how brilliant you are or what life-changing wisdom you're sharing. If you talk too long, that's what people are going to notice: "When is it going to end?"

Don't let this happen to you! Say what you have to say and then stop. But keep this in mind: the last thing you say will be the best remembered. So make your final impression a lasting one. Think about how you can make your last sentence memorable both in substance and delivery, especially in public presentations. 

Jack Welch, when he first became CEO of General Electric, used to end meetings with a simple phrase that became a mantra: "Change before you have to." It a great summation of Welch's business philosophy.

You can be motivational, challenging, thoughtful, respectful, or humorous – but know when to stop talking, and how to do it gracefully. I'll stop now.