My second week of brilliance
I’m at the end of the second week of my 90 days of brilliance. The highlight of my week was joining the A1 Business Forums and I already feel like I’m settling in there. I’ve stuck to my plan pretty well – I’m not always doing everything on the day that I’d planned to do it but everything on the list seems to be getting ticked off. One of my tasks for today is to plan the next 7 days. Must remember not to cram too much into each day.
The most ‘non brilliant’ thing this week is continuing problems with the bloomin’ car. I’m hoping to try a speed networking event next Friday, so fingers crossed that we’ve managed to get it fixed in time.
Confident Networking for Career Success and Satisfaction
The book easily passed the ‘easy to read’ test – it grabbed me straight away and kept me interested throughout. I liked the way that it didn’t jump straight in with the ‘you need to talk to as many people you don’t know as you can’ kind of stuff that usually goes hand in hand with networking advice. It acknowledges that not everybody is comfortable in networking situations and offers practical advice for how you can feel less daunted by it. I was also pleased that the authors recognised the value of online networking and offered some advice specifically about that (though best to ignore their description of ‘forums commonly known as blogging’).
What I wasn’t so satisfied with is that I didn’t feel like I came away from the book with a solid plan of action. I could go back through it and work through the different pieces of advice to slowly increase my confidence and skills, but the book doesn’t offer a particularly structured approach to this. Maybe I’m wanting to have my hand held a bit too much, but I do like it when practical books set you particular goals to achieve.
Rating: 
Buy “Confident Networking” from Amazon >
Start of another 90 days of brilliance
One of my favourite ‘sorting your life out’ books is How to Be Brilliant by Michael Heppell. I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll probably mention it again. The book helps you plan out ’90 days of brilliance’ to help you achieve or work towards achieving your goals. It’s a brilliant motivator.
Last week I came to the end of a 90-day period, which started well but kind of petered out into unbrilliance – though I did manage to get through my planned reading list, so it wasn’t a complete wash-out. So, I’ve spent the weekend working my goals and planning my next 90 days. This time I will stick to it! Helping me along is my good friend Sparkatrician, who is going to be my ‘brilliance buddy’. He’s also starting out on a 90-day plan so we will egg each other on and generally provide support. Have got our first phone call booked in for tomorrow night.
It’s been quite an intense weekend doing the prep, but I now have 90-, 30- and 7-day plans printed out and in my ‘brilliance folder’. Despite intending to limit my goals to a manageable amount, there’s quite a lot on there. Still, got to aim high! First step will be to get up at 6am tomorrow and do yoga.
Taking my own advice
After feeling a decided lack of oomph when I got up this morning I decided to take my own advice and did Tip 10 from my 10 tips for staying motivated – I gave myself a break. I decided that if I got through as much as I could before lunch time that I could take the afternoon off. That in itself was a great source of motivation and I actually got quite a bit done. Then when I stopped for lunch I turned my pc off and enjoyed a work-free afternoon. What did I do with it? Slept mostly, then watched a DVD and did some reading. Lovely, could get used to that! Of course I won’t though. Tomorrow it will be back to work and hopefully feeling a lot more with-it.
New article: motivation for home-workers
Another article is now in place: 10 tips for how to stay motivated when working from home. This is a particularly relevant one for me today as I haven’t been feeling brilliantly motivated. Will start tomorrow afresh having reminded myself of the techniques that work for me.
Is there anything that you do differently? A brilliant tip that could make all the difference. Leave a comment below, I’d be delighted to hear from you.
