Liz Strauss.com

I’ve never worked with a life coach, nor do I wish to be one.

However, in working with and training people, one idea of life coaching is, or should be, important to any business person in any business setting. That is how business, work, job, career, figures in the way a person views his or her life. What I’ve found in those I know, and what I suspect is true of most, is that few people actually think about the relationship they have set up between their work and their life. With that in mind, I offer these questions.

• What percentage of your life is not spend working? Do you have a long-term plan?
• In what ways have you built a life in which things other than your work define you?
• How often do you choose your life over work when the two demand your time?
• How often do you hear you work too much?
• When was your last vacation?

An inability to separate ourselves from our work doesn’t seem to be that different from an inability to separate ourselves from our parents. It also seems about as healthy and produces a similar response when the relationship is no longer there.

Employers want strong vital citizens who contribute value, not workers who bring the need to be personally defined and validated. Overachieving in that way disrupts a team, tries relationships, and often burns out the employee who gives himself or herself away.

No one wins.

Work at work. Live at life. Keep them separate to be the strongest and least stressed. Quality of life supports quality of work.

Liz Strauss.
Behind every business is a Successful and Outsanding manager. –Perfect Virtual Manager

In this world of technology, we need to read and write. Police officers write reports, Chefs and restaurant owners write reviews, business letters, and now are blogging too. Managers often ask teams to write the status of what they are working on. Performance appraisals often ask employees to write a self-evaluation, complete with performance goals. Every business person I have worked with since the last century has communicated via email.

It’s my experience that most folks don’t have training or confidence in how to put what needs to be said into writing. This not only causes miscommunication, it also reflects on job performance, projecting a lower image of competency than is reality. The gap in training and confidence also steals time and causes stress as people work and worry over how to express their ideas and issues in writing.

Even teachers have this problem.

Though enthusiasm and job commitment help to overcome hurdles in other situations, at the juncture of writing without confidence, experience, or complete training, enthusiasm, and commitment can often cause additional stress and be debilitating. Writers begin to self-edit before they have even started writing, and they get what folks call writer’s block. What they really have is a major case of stress cause by a fear of failing. It’s dangerous to miscommunicate in writing.

How to Lower Stress When Writing

I offer this checklist to help writers refocus, to bring their thinking back to the writing, it’s purpose, and the audience it will be serving.

1. Make the work area visually clean.
2. Think about the person that is the audience. If the audience is a group, imagine a prototypical individual from that group to write for. Let’s call that person your reader.
3. Consider your reader’s traits and characteristics — know that your reader is intelligent, but doesn’t have the information you are about to share.
4. Decide what you want your reader to remember. Write that out in words your reader might actually use to say it.
5. Prepare notes — bullet points — to organize your thoughts around what you want your reader to remember. Most informal communication should convey less than three bullet points. One idea or bullet point is perfectly fine in an email.
6. Use the right tool to communicate. Know the heirarchies of business communication. Understand which is most appropriate and effective for the information you have to share.
   Instant Message > Email > Business Letter > Formal Proposal
   Instant Message > VoIP/Telephone > Meeting
7. Write up your message, using your notes and a clear mental image of your reader and the venue as you write.

Follow this checklist and you’ll find that stress will fall away. Writer’s block won’t be a worry, because you’ll know what you want to say, who you want to say it to, and how you want to say it. You’ll know the type of communication and the venue. You’ll be able to imagine your audience and get to what they need to hear from you to understand your message.

Almost always writer’s block is caused by the fact that we don’t know what we want to say or who we’re talking to.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding manager. –Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz Strauss

Look around your desk. Look around your work area. Use this checklist to help you make your workplace a low-stress zone. Each time you answer “no,” plan to adjust the situation.

• Is the overall picture you see one that makes you feel organized, in control, well aware of where everything in your work life is?
• Are the things you see closest to you the things you use most often?
• Is anything that you use often missing or unecessarily out of reach, somewhere you must go to get it?
• Is the area where you most often write and think free from visual distraction — items and papers that remind you of other things you might be working on?
• Could you map each location of your work area and describe it’s purpose in business terms to someone who visited you for the first time?
• Are your tools, surfaces, and equipment clean, free of dust, and in working order?
• Can you apply these same values to your file system and the things you use that are outside your visual workspace as well?

Things out of place or out of reach steal time from us, seconds here and there that we often need. We’re aware of that when we’re under a deadline and need to walk across the room to get paper for the printer next to our desk. We’re aware when we need a document in a pile that’s accumulated rather in a place with others like it.

We’re less aware of the stress of a dusty desktop or a pile of clutter nearby. Yet they cause similar distruption to our thoughts. Each time we see that smudge on our computer screen a quick thought interrupts saying I ought to clean that. A document that is tied to a deliverable will remind us whenever our eyes fall on it. An old list of things to do will make us wonder whether it holds something we might have forgotten.

An orderly workspace sends a signal to our unconscious that we’re in control. It also tells those who work with us that they can trust our work to get done in an orderly fashion. Even more importantly, an ordered workspace keeps us moving forward without distractions helping us make more time to do the things that need doing.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding manager.–Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz Strauss

Even more difficult to see are our relationships to our goals. These orientations to the outcomes that are important to the roles and functions that we serve can often be at cross purposes, or at the least add some conflict to our achieving what we see as the most perfect end. A look at the goal orientations across a team throughout an enterprise makes it obvious that these differences also can cause stress in our working relationships.

• On the warehouse floor, the shipping crew works to ship a product on time that will arrive packaged well and easy to carry and unpack.
• In customer service, the person on the phone has a goal to make a lifelong customer relationship..
• In accounts receivable, they hope that the price is a value that the customer understands and agrees with.
• The marketing folks want to be sure that the product meets current customer needs and desires with solid features and benefits.
• In the field, a sales rep wants a product that customers will immediately recognize and understand as useful to them. One that he or she won’t have to sell, but instead simply “show and tell.”
• In R&D, employees want to make state of the art.quality. They work for the highest design features supported by user-friendly, user-proof documentation
• The directors want their departments to meet the strategiy and budgets for the three year plan.
• The investors want all departments coming in as predicted on the yearly financials.
• The CEO wants all of the above and more.

All goals are important to the operation. Yet no outcome can stand alone and call itself perfection. An R&D masterpeice that doesn’t sell is not a masterpeice at all. The silo-ing of departmental goals divides the power of the enterprise. It causes friction as each part attempts perfection without the support of the other departments.

Stress is inevitable when an organization does not focus on a common outcome. The common outcome is delighting the customer with something that makes customers’ lives easier or more enjoyable.

When a leadership team understands that they must set goals across the organization. The level of stress becomes a shared burden. By nature of being supported from above and divided among many, the stress to each worker is much lower and often looks more like motivating energy.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. –Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz Strauss