One More Move
Author: Zinga H
One Thing Your Goal Absolutely Needs For Success
Welcome to a new week everyone! I’m happy to know you are still present.
I’m still here sharing what I can, my everlasting reminder that YOU are the key to your success. How you nurture, care, comfort, and create your Self over time will determine much of your outcomes on your success path. Of course, the only way to work on oneself is to spend time reflecting inwardly on who we are, why we are who we are, and who we are becoming. So I’m glad to have you here reflecting with me. If you ever want to share, comment below or send a message.
Now back to my life’s call-to-action of nurturing humanity’s Self-success, there are many quick tricks a success seeker will learn over the years. We adhere to the importance of following up, strive to listen to others, and remember to stay focused, but many of us have an essential go-to move that we know will ensure we make it happen.
Here is my go-to:
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Write it down.
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Yup, that is one absolutely, positively essential move needed to make sure you get your big goals done.
Now wait a minute, Zinga, I don’t care for writing…
Okay, maybe you don’t. Maybe you are so attuned to your learning style that you have transcended the most basic tools for retaining human memories: the paper and pencil. I get it and I understand. If you must; find another medium, but the message remains the same. If you want to achieve your goals, you must first bring your imagination of a goal into reality, by any means necessary. This means making a physical prototype of your goal. Writing is a basic, yet effective way of prototyping your vision. Of course,there are other ways, and I am an avid advocate of working within your learning style to get things done.
In fact, I created an infographic on ways to keep your vision (i.e. the long-term goal) ahead of you.
But there are some key benefits from solely writing down your goal to make sure it gets done. One study covered by NPR and conducted by the University of Toronto demonstrated that when students wrote down their motivations and faced their obstacles on paper, the achievement gap disappeared between genders and races. This powerful act of writing our goals into being allowed typically underachieving student groups gets us to organize our thoughts, which allows us to resolve stressors while finding the mental fuel for our passions.
So our One More Move for this week is to do just that. Write down those goals, and if you’ve already written your goals down go over them again and perhaps refine the sentence even further.
But..Zinga…What about me the non-writer?
First, you should send me a message with your the goal you have in mind or schedule a 15-minute chat, we can customize a solution together. Then there’s that infographic I created just to get you started right away. Let me know what you think and if you have any tips for keeping your goals ahead of you!
A Case for Linking Online Presence to Your Success
For anyone asking Purposely Chosen Women is underway and going well! At the last session, we discussed our personal brand and how it to our goal keeps us focused, while it attracts the people who are meant to support us in our lives. Going through this session really impacted my own insight on how branding performs as a tool for our own personal success. First, a quick definition of branding to keep us on the same page.
Simply put, your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from that of your competitors. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be and who people perceive you to be. – Entrepreneur.com Small Business Encyclopedia
I say you branding is what your circle thinks of you even when you’re not around.
The highly subjective amorphous blob that is your brand could easily spin out of control if you are not true to your core. Your core purpose that is, the one acts as a gravity pulling all the pieces and people you need to establish your destined imprint on the world. The practice of personal branding acts during your movement towards success.
What we are really here to talk about though is online branding. Your online brand can be a highly controlled and targeted simulacrum of your real-life brand. With some focus and effort, you can start building your promise all line for your ideal community to see. This allows you to gain leadership and trust online, which are key components of success.
How it Helps
It helps create internal awareness
When we reflect on our online brand and actively establish it, we concern ourselves with questions about who we are and how our thoughts are portrayed. We center our internal beings on our internal voice of purpose, which allows us to connect to our inner self on a regular basis.
Cultivates external awareness
If you never communicate, people will never you. While there are many forms of communication, online branding allows us to create our own personal archive of our communications. Whether it is writing a blog or showing a video of our perfect piece of grilled zucchini, the internet affords audio, video, and written formats for communication. Find the ways that you are most happy with and stick to it!
Builds our expertise while gaining
Online branding is not only who you currently are, but also who you are becoming. This means your moving to a future state that may not exist. Will fill this path to the future with experience, learning, trials, errors, success. What we learn and the fruits of our labor are the pieces we share with the world. By building our brand we strengthen our capacity to know all about our core purpose. From building a business to baking cinnamon rolls, we can become an expert on the things people know makes us special. More importantly, people can trust to expect that we know something about our special something.
Where to Start
Start with the online brand presence audit. Answer some of the following questions below and consider how you can begin to build your foundation or improve upon your already built foundation.
- What’s my one-sentence message to the world?
- How often can I consistently communicate this message?
- Where and how do I want to communicate this message online?
- What’s my style?
- What impression do I make on others? (Ask 3 or more people)
How to Grow
When you are armed with this information, think about and create some goals for your online presence growth.
Stick to a select amount of online platforms, such as WordPress, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Then follow these tips.
- Never stop listening – As you grow, your circle will too. Listen to them for constructive input, new trends to try, or even for inspiration.
- Stay consistent – Your brand is dynamic and growing, so it requires a certain amount of consistent activity to keep a pace of growth. Find a way to consistently build and do consistently.
- Change accordingly – Review your brand for areas to change and improve. Whether it’s from some input of information or your frequency of presence. Change when it fits your core purpose.
How can I be consistent and change at the same time Zinga???
Well, that’s just the balance of life. As long as the change is a part of your core purpose and aligns to your true values, you will be staying consistent.
What am I missing? Certainly , there are a TON of tools, platforms, and mediums to grow your online brand. Get started today, and you can msg me for my personal online brand audit checklist.
Until next week.
Audit Your Success Path with these 5 Questions
Your success is the purpose of this blog.
Those who have been on their own success path for a while know there is a point where stopping to review, assess, and align is key to re-clearing the path that leads to your final vision.
How do you know when it is time to audit your success path?
While sometimes there may be huge red flags, like falling into deep addiction or burning out on a project you really cared about, most of the time there will only be subtle clues like debilitating procrastination, overbooking yourself with priorities, and a feeling overall stress.
Whatever the signals will be for you, the outcome will be clear you are not moving forward in ways that matter.
While there are many audits we can perform, financial, social media, productivity, etc. the one for our personal success will only take connecting with our inner selves and openly reflecting and receiving on the answers we bring out. These five questions will help you dissect what points in your success path could use some focus and where you are doing well already.
1. What are my current priorities?
2. How do they align with my larger purpose?
3. What ways am I dividing my time on a daily and weekly basis? How do that support my larger purpose?
4. How consistent am I towards working on my success?
5. What is draining my energy and how would I rather invest this energy?
While audits can be a deep exploration of your current status, you can use these questions as a way to begin to unfold what might be holding you back, which in turn gives you a place to find solutions. It is absolutely imperative that you listen to your honest answer, whatever it may be. I’m not reading your answers and no one else is, so there’s no need to be polished/pretty/etc. If you do want to discuss your answers know I’m always here 🙂
Comment or Contact Me Anytime.
3 Time Saving Tools for Entrepreneurial Parents
Kids definitely have their future cut out for them. I, as a young Millennial parent, still have hope for them. Sure there is strong evidence of deep flaws in our systems of civilization, there is still hope that the human spirit will overcome, create, and innovate in response to the needs of the world. The spirit of the entrepreneur lives strong.
But what happens when the entrepreneurial spirit collides with the child spirit? Suddenly the burning obsessiveness that Napoleon Hill says we need to focus on to truly transmute our thoughts into reality, is interrupted, by tiny hands that want to type like Mommy on her keyboard. Those tiny hands love to explore, to help, and to just be, and as someone who doesn’t want to suppress her inner spirit, I have to find ways to fit in time for goal work and family time. Luckily, there are some tricks of the trade to help balance nurturing her and my purpose.
Tool 1 # Baby Gates
One big tool has been using baby gates, not to wrap her up, but to wrap up our stuff. us the baby gate to place around the entertainment systems and other places where she prefers to reach and grab. This way what is freely available she is okay to play with and the glowy electronic buttons are off limits.
Tool #2 Timer
One great quality about a good entrepreneur is we could just do stuff all day. When focused, we do and do and do and the effects are amazing. Yet, balancing our time takes an accounting of our time. When feeling pressed for time, set a time limit and focus happily and completely on what you want to do. For instance, when I get home from work spending time with my daughter is a key source of happiness, but I also have signed up for responsibilities that require me to respond to people, so I set a timer for getting things done. Whether it’s 40-minute session for story time or 20-minute email crafting for my team, by setting timers I am freed from time. One of my favorites is the Pomodoro timer, which sets the time to 25 minutes.
Tool #3 YouTube
Yup, I said it, YouTube has some pretty useful educational videos for toddlers and children. One thing I like to focus on Baby Einsteins. As a double benefit, a lot of the music could double as white noise, which has a minimal distraction for a parent who needs to focus. Just check out one of the episodes below:
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to use tools to help with raising kids while living up the entrepreneurial lifestyle. What do you use? How do you balance? Like, I’d really love to know…I’ve spent 1.5 decades raising kids and have yet to find the perfect formula.
The Theory Behind Purposely Chosen Women Leadership Series
How far have you taken your goals?
Or do you set goals at all?
As people, we find ourselves yearning for more than we have and to stretch beyond any perceived limitations in our lives. Yet, formal goal setting can stir a lot of anxiety in us. When we set about creating a real goal to achieve anything that means we are setting ourselves up to take actions we haven’t taken before in our lives. We have to figure out new steps, new people, or find new resources, all which may have never existed before we set this goal. What’s worst is our goals may not absolutely come to fruition how we planned thus proving against what we set to do. Furthermore, we are setting ourselves up to either succeed or fail because we may just go on not taking the actions we hoped to start at the beginning of our new goal. Thus we might face a huge amount of disappointment just by living the lives we’re already living.
Somehow, we still figure out ways to set goals and achieve them or we don’t. If only we can move closer to the side of more goals achieved than not, and if they are not if is for good purpose. This is one of the primary motivations for my development of the Purposely Chosen Women’s Leadership program curriculum.
Below is a selection from the entire curriculum plan that overviews the driving theories behind this program’s development.
Limitless Ambition is a non-profit organization developing a community adult enrichment program titled Purposely Chosen Women’s Leadership Series. The focus of the program is to equip women with the skills and tools they need to be successful in their careers or entrepreneurial ventures. Limitless Ambition has a mission to have educational, motivational, and inspirational programs that use mentoring, community outreach and other resources to increase the economic equity of the female gender. Incorporating this mission into the program is a major component of the design. In addition, this program will be a way to further enhance the lives of women ages 18-30 by helping them get to a level of success so they can, in turn, support and mentor the success of emerging young women.
This is a new curriculum as the organization is a start-up and is in the process of beginning to connect with the local community within the Akron, Ohio area. Our program organizers firmly believe in the ideas of establishing self-efficacy through skills and tools mastery. Using the time and space of the program to ensure practice is what, we believe, will set us apart from other non-profit organizations. This means our curriculum will be designed with an emphasis on experiential learning, which works as a “holistic integrative perspective” by combining “experience, perception, cognition, and behavior” (Kolb, 1984, p.21), to help students embody the content and proposed outcomes of the program.
The foundation of the program incorporates the research based on self-efficacy and organizational learning theories. Both theories propose the importance of working with the root triggers, motivations, fears, and causes to produce an effective outcome. The design of the workshops is modeled on experiential learning, which provides an adequate format to sustain our theoretical goals.Students practice during the workshop sessions allowing them to grow comfortable with their confidence while surrounding by a supportive network of women learning with them.
The key goal is to build self-efficacy, which ensures that participants will gain confidence in the practices of career and entrepreneurial success by enacting out the process it takes to achieve it. Propelled by Albert Bandura, self-efficacy can be defined as “the conviction that one can successfully execute the behavior to produce the outcomes” (Bandura, 1977, p. 79). Finally, organizational learning theory works to ensure that limits to success are overcome through using group dynamics to “adapt to changing environments, draw lessons from past successes and failures, and detect and correct errors of the past, anticipate and respond to impending threats, engage in continuous innovation, and build and realize images of a desirable future” (Harper and Quay, p. 145).
Both self-efficacy and organizational learning theory focus on the development of the Self and our ability to respond to setbacks, limits, or crises on the way to accomplishing a defined goal. We find the experiential learning model to be a great fit for driving forward both theoretical tenets. The model places personal experience in relation to abstract concepts as at the center of learning. Then it places a heavy emphasis on the feedback through reflection, observation, and active assessment by the student to integrate what is being learned (Kolb, 1984).
Overall, the concepts incorporated with our mission will help develop curriculum that helps every individual woman draft a plan and method for achieving their desired outcomes in their careers or entrepreneurial projects. It will equip them with ways to successfully execute their plans and prepare them for evaluating ways to overcome limits that arise on the path to their goal.
Find out more
References:
| Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory. N.J. Prentice-Hall, Inc. |
| Harper, S.R & Quay, S.J. (2008) Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Diverse Populations. NY. Routledge.
Kolb, D.A. (1984) Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice Hall. Retrieved from: http://academic.regis.edu/ed205/Kolb.pdf |
Career Champs with Alicia Robinson, Founder and Executive Director of Limitless Ambition
Bootstrapping a non-profit is no light affair.
I remember the night like it was yesterday. Frustrated with being severely limited at my job, I needed a way to vent my insatiable need to create solutions to complex problems, and I found myself meeting with the coolest professional woman in the coolest building on campus at what was formerly known as the Blackstone Launchpad.
It was a semi-transparent glass box, smack dab in the middle of the student center, and having encountered her before, I curiously wondered how we could connect. When we met, she gave me the invitation to an All the CEO Ladies networking meeting later that week. It was after work so I went. It was there that the true connection was made.
It was there that the true connection was made.
We all had to pitch as a part of the membership. I came up with an idea to develop a social app that categorized and simplified who will be on the current political ballot. Everyone cheered, it was and still is a pretty crucial invention that we can’t quite get popularized.
Then it was her turn, Alicia Robinson. She sat and cheered everyone through their ideas and made friends pretty instantly. Like a cool older sister that you wonder where they get their je ne sais quoi. We all heard her stitch together her vision of a future where women accept our pain because it pushes toward a life of purpose and passion. Where we network together to build youth girls to dream, believe, and achieve without limits. An organization she would call Limitless Ambition, Inc.
An organization she would call Limitless Ambition, Inc.
Her ideas of the future were so grand and so big, it almost felt like one’s first visit to the late FAO Schwartz. She had the determination in her voice that made everyone feel like all the pitches we gave would pan out perfectly, just because we said it. We wanted her to succeed because we felt our own limitless ambition fueling us there in each others presence. A room full of young, emerging women hoping to craft a better future with our best ideas.
Start-Up Leadership Lessons
By this point, I had experience with growing and refining strategies for non-profits so I agreed to join the group and help create a strategic plan, while doing some marketing. that is where I learned that a start-up non-profit is a completely different canvas. This is when I learned that a start-up non-profit is a completely different canvas than the well-established organizations I was used to before starting college. Becuase it was a start-up, I was voted into the position of president, a role I was surprised to be offered. Yet, my initiative and understanding of the mission along with my comfort with strategic management fit for a startup. I agreed to take the position for three years, we the stipulation that we would spend time finding a president of a much higher-profile by the end of my term.
Alicia and I were still in school at the time, we both also worked full-time had tight millennial budgets, an untapped network, and starter experience to boot. Our passion wouldn’t let that stop us, and, thankfully, Blackstone Launchpad, now KSU Launchnet provided an excellent source of wisdom, connections, and support along the way. We had late nights, early emails, weekly and twice-weekly meetings; we devoted any minute of our free time, effort, and attention into making sure Limitless Ambition, Inc did everything as thoroughly as possible, to show we could match the pace of our peers. What we learned was that we had something that worked and that we had to keep serving those around us because they found value every time.
Our Start Up Nonprofit Grows Up
It is no easy journey and we still have a long road to walk. There were small successes, frustrating failures, arguments, and awkward moments of facing our truths, so we could improve and move on. Yet, all along the way, we knew the moments were moments of empowerment, which was exactly the point. Thus, we kept moving forward, ego bruises and all. Now, we are preparing to host our next summer program and we have grown our team from around 5 to over 20 in three years time. Our organization has had a reach of over 600 people face to face and we have a locally-targeted social media reach of 4000+, all while working our passions part time.
As our team grew our hectic schedules quelled, and now we face new leadership lessons beyond the ones of our early start-up days. How do we ensure our mission is reflected in every aspect of our work? How can we provide community transparency that builds trust amongst those we serve and support? How can we be better leaders, still?
This may be my last year serving as the president of Limitless Ambition, so I hope to leave my lessons here for those who will carry the torch forward. Take a moment below to watch me interview Alicia in my special podcast segment below.
OMM: Massage Another
Happy Monday Everyone!
Here’s another small actionable step we can take towards building success.
Massage Another
Find someone you know or don’t know and make them feel good. Either physically with your hands or spiritually with kind words. This act alone will provide you an opportunity feel good for doing good and help someone else feel good as well. It’s double the result on your singular effort.
Summer Projects and the Season of Success
So I have a fun mission this summer. Help 20 women set a long-term strategic goal to reach a new level of success in their personal or professional lives. It’s for the startup Limitless Ambition, Inc. of which I am the current acting president. Putting on a long term project of such a nature is a great way to review a living case study of building a community action project that serves to build the success of others.
Stay tuned for further updates in this series. Starting with a special video interview from the Founder of Limitless Ambition, Alicia Robsinson!
An experiential learning workshop designed to give women the tools and tactics needed to achieve long-term success goals.
Stay tuned success seekers or follow Limitless Ambition on Facebook for more updates.
Lessons Learned From Leading Limitless Ambition
As I get ready for the gala this week, I realize that this leadership ride I’ve been on has shaped some powerful lessons in my life. You see, when I was in grad school I was a woman seeking to take a stance of power within my life and the world around me. Thanks to connections made at Kent State University’s LaunchNet, I was fortunate enough to encounter a young startup non-profit that had a motto aimed at helping girls dream, believe, and achieve without limits. As a lover of building solutions from scratch and human empowerment, I found a home to pursue my passion of achieving long-term strategic goals, while doing good in the world.
Shortly after, I found myself to be the president-elect of Limitless Ambition, Inc. and while growing a non-profit organization that empowers women in Northeast Ohio, I’ve come to unearth many areas of growth. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned after 2 full years in the position.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse. Read more.
Zinga Hart 
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