Seegers & Associates

11/19/2019

11/15/2019

They say the lightbulb was Thomas Edison’s 1,001st experiment. The first 1,000 were duds.

Whether or not this is literal fact or legend, it makes a good point we can all stand to be reminded of: It’s okay to fail.

Or, as Denzel Washington said in his 2011 commencement speech at the University of Pennsylvania, “fall forward.”

In my 30+ years as a recruiter, I’ve definitely seen many people fall forward. Sometimes it takes a while to find the ideal job or the ideal candidate to fulfill a role.

Learning from each interview, and each effort, is the important thing.

Take it from Washington: “Every graduate here today has the training and the talent to succeed, but do you have the guts to fail? If you don’t fail, you’re not even trying.”

If you need a little inspiration, I invite you to watch Washington’s speech.

Awesomely inspirational speech by Denzel Washington. NOTE: This is an abridged version of his 2011 Penn State commencement speech. To watch his full speech, ...

11/12/2019

Like a lot of us, I’ve worked hard to polish some pretty useless skills.

I’m thinking about “skills” like perfectionism, excuse-making and a deep expertise in controlling everything I can.

You?

These are not skills we’re born with, but we sure do get excellent at them over time — and that’s not a good thing.

On Lifehack, I read an interesting piece about the eight skills we could all stand to remove from our repertoire.

In addition to the ones I just mentioned, there’s fear, a fixed mindset, the desire for overnight success, the need to say yes when we don’t mean it, and the habit of surrounding ourselves with toxic people.

Now, we’re not all excellent at all of these skills. But most of us have honed at least a few.

Knock them off your repertoire, and you don’t just break bad habits.

You make space for more useful skills like emotional intelligence, human connection, communication prowess, and, of course, the hard skills we all need in our particular jobs.

Personally, this is my new mantra: “Matt, you have my permission to get worse at all of these things.”

If you want to be more successful you need to remove the bad habits from your life. This is because they distract you and hold you back from success.

09/18/2019

You’ve probably heard some version of the wisdom “At the end of their life, few people say they wish they’d worked harder.”

Time versus money is the age-old job conundrum.

Say you have a choice between two jobs. Do you take the one that pays better but involves more hours and a longer commute? Or the one that pays less but offers more lifestyle flexibility?

Three Harvard Business School faculty decided to explore exactly how new college graduates make such choices. They surveyed more than 1,000 college graduates from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The study was followed up two years later to assess how the choices these students had made played out as they launched their careers.

Notably, those who placed a higher value on time than money reported back as generally happier. They made different career choices than their opposite types, and typically enjoyed their work more.

In other words, it’s not just about a “work hard/play hard” mentality. Happier folks actually enjoy working. In fact, data shows that people who place a higher priority on time don’t in fact work less. They simple enjoy the work they do more.

09/12/2019

Fall down. Get up. Fall down. Get up. Fall down. Get up.

The flip side of failure is resilience.

Anyone who’s ever followed an underdog sports team until they finally won a big game knows just how important repeated failure is to building up endurance, tenacity and grit.

And speaking of sports, an HBR survey of 2,000 NCAA coaches came back with four things all resilient athletic teams have in common:

1 - They believe they work better together, with an ability to effectively complete tasks as a team.
2 - They have a common mental teamwork model.
3 - They improvise well.
4 - They trust each other.

This last point is critical for a team to persevere until it wins — and this generalism extends far beyond the sports world into the corporate world as well. Teams that trust each other are willing to take individual and interpersonal risks. They also feel comfortable sharing creative or offbeat ideas.

Resilient team members don’t fear ridicule. And that frees them up to innovate.

09/10/2019

Trust: It’s not just a warm, fuzzy word. It’s the hallmark of high-performing organizations.

So it stands to reason that understanding how trust works would be important to company leaders.

Turns out, there’s a biology to trust. According to Paul J. Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, it has to do with two “neurological idiosyncrasies” of the human brain that allow us to trust and collaborate with people outside our immediate social group (something no other animal is capable of doing).

The first is the hypertrophied cortex, where insight, planning and abstract thought occur. The second is empathy — a uniquely human ability to share the emotions of others.

There’s also a strong relation between the neurochemical oxytocin and our tendency to trust (or not) another. Like love, another oxytocin-adjacent emotion, trust makes us feel less anxious and makes connecting with others feel really good.

The more you inspire trust in your teams and colleagues, the better everyone feels and the more your organization can perform.

09/06/2019

You’ve perhaps heard of the study that proved prisoners up for parole are more likely to get it approved in the morning than after the judge returns (sleepy) from lunch?

Decision fatigue is a real thing, and it affects everyone — not just justices. The more decisions we make in a day, the worse our decision-making gets over the course of that day.

And considering that another research study showed the typical person making about 2,000 small decisions every waking hour, no one is exempt from decision fatigue. In fact, being strung out and overtired is one of the top 6 reasons people make bad decisions at work.

Contrary to popular belief, a quadruple macchiato is not the best way to solve decision fatigue when it sets in at work. As Harvard Business Review puts it, “To counter it, identify the most important decisions you need to make, and, as often as possible, prioritize your time so that you make them when your energy levels are highest.”.