We’ve all been there. 

You arrange a Zoom meeting, prepare your notes, double-check you don’t have any food in your teeth, make sure your background looks professional, log in to the system, and then…

Nothing. 

The other person isn’t there. So, you wait. Five minutes. Ten minutes. But still, nothing.

You try to be patient, but eventually, you start to get pretty annoyed. After a while, a little voice in your head tells you to send a snarky message like, “I’m here. Where are you?” or “You joining?” 

In They Ask, You Answer, Marcus Sheridan shows us that content strategies do not have to be complicated to be effective. They can be as straightforward as “answer the questions customers have about your product or industry.”

This philosophy, Sheridan says, offers two main benefits. First and foremost, it helps businesses build trust with the people who visit their websites. Customers generally respect companies that are honest and transparent about their products. They are often distrusting of organizations that cannot or will not provide them with the info they need to know before they make a purchase.

This increase in trust leads to the second benefit of the They Ask, You Answer philosophy: more sales. People want to buy from companies they believe to be honest and trustworthy.

As a coach, I often have clients tell me they are feeling overwhelmed at work. For most people, this feeling is caused by one thing: having too many projects on their plate at the same time.

Over the years, I have found the best way to reduce that stress is to create a list of those tasks or projects and review it while asking yourself the following three questions:

Last week, we discussed the three main styles of learning. To recap, they are:

Visual Learning: Absorbing information by visualizing it.
Auditory Learning: Absorbing information by hearing it.
Kinaesthetic Learning: Absorbing information through hands-on experience.

But how can you put that knowledge into practice? How can you cater to your workers’ different learning styles to help them better understand new concepts and processes? 

All you need to do is follow these three steps:

In your role as a manager, you will need to teach your team things like:

New sales and customer service techniques
New industry regulations
New company policies
New internal processes, and 
New products and services

If you want your lessons to be effective, it’s vital to remember that not everyone learns the same way. In fact, there are three distinct styles of learning. They are:

Are you satisfied with your job?

At first glance, this may seem like a straightforward question. However, throughout my coaching career, I've discovered that people often have trouble answering this because there are so many factors that come into play, such as:

Job duties

Compensation 

Work-life balance

Relationships with colleagues, and

Respect and appreciation from management 

If you’re happy with your responsibilities and your compensation, but your manager doesn’t give you the respect you deserve and you don’t see any room for growth, are you satisfied with your job? 

Kinda? Sorta? Not really? Sometimes?

Can you please tell our readers about “The Book That Changed Your Life”? Can you share a story about how it impacted you?

Yes, it’s hard to pick just one. But I’m going with Hannibal and Me by Andreas Kluth. This book is about success and failure and the various definitions of the two; it’s about the different paths people take with their lives and how it shapes them and prepares them for leadership and big moments. Hannibal is the backdrop for this book. It weaves in stories from other influential figures such as Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark), Tiger Woods and more.

Last week, we discussed some of the things movie trailers can teach us about writing a resume. In particular, we learned that a resume's main job is to make a hiring manager want to see the feature film (i.e. an interview with you).

Here are some simple and practical things you can do to create an enticing resume and boost your response rate:

I get it. Writing a resume can be a challenging and stressful experience. How do you fit an entire career’s worth of education, experience, and achievement into a single page? 

A lot of people struggle to do it. As a result, they end up creating resumes that are three, four, or even five pages long.

Having been involved in recruiting for several years, I can tell you that these lengthy resumes do not usually receive a great deal of attention from employers. Hiring managers frequently need to review dozens of resumes per day, so they just don’t have time to read a four-page document.

If you want to boost your chances of landing the job of your dreams, it is almost always better to keep your resume short and sweet.

Remember, your resume’s job is to get you an interview, not tell your life story.