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Power up your career by aligning work, fitness, and emotional wellbeing

Posted in News at 1:11 am on 06.20.08 by Joshua Seldman

“Executive Stamina is a brilliant how-to book. It will help anyone maximize his or her full career potential and live a more balanced, integrated life . . . priceless.”
Michael White, CEO, PepsiCo International, and Vice Chairman, PepsiCo

Executive Stamina By Executive Coach Marty Seldman And Fitness Expert Joshua Seldman Provides Holistic Approach To Career And Life Success

Aligning personal goals with career goals has never been more difficult than it is today. As technology shrinks the world and businesses compete on a global level, executive workloads have increased dramatically. People feel they must stay connected 24/7, making it nearly impossible to get away from the office. Although working round-the-clock may seem like the road to career success, for most people, it’s actually a recipe for career disaster and personal disappointment.

Executive Stamina

In EXECUTIVE STAMINA (Wiley, May 2008), executive coach Marty Seldman and fitness expert Joshua Seldman tackle this problem head-on, providing a holistic approach to help executives maximize their career potential, maintain their physical health, and align their actions with their core values. Focusing on fitness, nutrition, time and stress management, and building positive relationships, EXECUTIVE STAMINA is the key to increasing effectiveness at work, while enhancing personal happiness and fulfillment.

A clinical psychologist, Marty Seldman has coached executives at companies like Disney, PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, and General Electric for more than twenty years. He has carefully tracked their progress and includes case studies from his work in the book. His son Joshua Seldman, a champion endurance athlete and trainer, has contributed a scientifically based nutrition and exercise program to EXECUTIVE STAMINA to help executives stay physically fit and achieve peak performance in all areas of their lives.

The book is divided into five parts:


Work/Life Alignment
– Using exercises and answering questions, readers identify what is truly important to them. They then analyze their current schedules to determine whether the way they spend their time is aligned with their top priorities and values. The authors also show readers how to identify their career “sweet spot,” the work that satisfies them the most.

Health And Wellness – In this section, readers learn to establish fitness, nutrition, and stress management systems necessary to sustain energy, enthusiasm, and focus. The authors include complete guidelines for integrating healthy practices into one’s daily life at work, at home, and on the road.

Job Performance And Business Results – This section focuses on staying in control while minimizing distractions and unnecessary stress. Readers learn how to make the best use of their time, identifying high payoff activities that maximize success.

Career Management – Career progression is not just about doing the best job possible. It’s also about understanding how the system works. What are the competencies needed for growth? Who decides which executives will get promoted? Why is networking and selfpromotion important? This section teaches key skills to maximize career progression, and includes an in-depth discussion of the most common mistakes that can derail careers.

Maintaining Positive Relationships – A successful business career can present challenges to personal relationships – and personal relationships can present challenges to a business career. Yet having strong relationships with family and friends is a key to overall happiness. This section includes practices to help executives maintain meaningful relationships, despite hectic workloads.

Combining the wisdom and methodology of the very best executive coaching with the cutting edge training techniques of world-class athletes, EXECUTIVE STAMINA will help executives at all levels and in all industries fulfill their potential at work and in life. Throughout the book, the authors emphasize “progressive change” and “improvement not perfection,” making it easy for anyone to take the first steps towards life-enhancing change.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Marty Seldman, Ph.D. is one of the world’s most experienced and successful executive coaches and is president of Seldman Executive Development Programs (www.seldman.com). He is the co-author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Survival of the Savvy: High-Integrity Political Tactics for Career and Company Success as well as the author of Super Selling Through Self-Talk: The Ultimate Edge In Sales Success. As an organizational consultant, Dr. Seldman specializes in team building, conflict resolution, feedback systems, and skills and workshops in building and maintaining trust. He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Temple University.

Joshua Seldman is a highly respected cycling and fitness coach and a successful endurance athlete. During his professional athletic career, he was a twelve-hour and twentyfour- hour solo mountain bike champion. He was also a lead coach for Carmichael Training Systems and Lance Armstrong’s Tour of Hope cross-country ride. He received his B.S. in exercise physiology, specializing in sports psychology from the University of Florida.

EXECUTIVE STAMINA
How to Optimize Time, Energy, and Productivity to Achieve Peak Performance
By Marty Seldman, Ph.D. and Joshua Seldman
Publisher: Wiley
Publication Date: May 2008
Price: $24.95 / hardcover
Interview contact: lori@wesmanpr.com
ISBN: 978-0-470-22290-4

Strengthen relationships

Posted in Tips at 8:04 pm on 06.19.08 by Joshua Seldman

family picture

Use our best practices to strengthen your relationships with coworkers, friends and family.

Do we need ‘loved ones’ (i.e. friends and family) to be successful in business? No. There are many examples of high achievers in the corporate world who are basically loners with very low need for affiliation.

Do we need close personal relationships to be happy? Most people will answer yes and research supports the association between positive relationships and reported happiness. Tim Kasser, associate professor at Lenox College, in a study on intrinsic values, found that people who focused on being connected to friends and family, exploring interests and skills and “making the world a better place” were happier than those who focused mostly on material goals. Marriage, at least for men, is also linked with higher levels of health and increased longevity. Good relationships can provide a source of support, empathy, listening, sharing, laughter, love and even meaning. In addition, family objectives are often a key motivator for an executive’s strivings.

As wonderful as this sounds, a business career can present challenges to relationships and relationships can present challenges to a business career. The first reason is time, something I talk about in each chapter. Forming and maintaining good relationships requires time. The second reason is the potential for relationships to deteriorate. Relationships are particularly prone to being impacted by vicious cycles. These cycles can eventually consume large quantities of time and energy and distract our focus from other goals and priorities.

So the irony is that, if relationships don’t receive the time, energy and focus that are needed to support them, they can become major consumers of your time, energy and focus. The flip side of those wonderful attributes (empathy, laughter, love, etc.) I described earlier is that relationships have the potential to bring out some of the worst feeling we may ever experience. Guilt, resentment, insecurity, humiliation, abandonment and abuse can be, and is, experienced in relationships.

Develop career savvy

Posted in Tips at 7:58 pm on by Joshua Seldman

puzzle

Learn how to use organizational savvy to position yourself for success.

Organizational savvy refers to a set of skills that combines personal integrity with sound judgment regarding corporate practices and human nature. It has many applications, which include evoking influence and persuasion, maintaining high integrity organizations, and fostering effective collaboration. But here we will focus on the importance of Org Savvy in career management.

In Survival of the Savvy (Free Press, 2004), Rick Brandon and I wrote in depth about the wide variety of practices associated with being savvy. Here, we will review the basics, or fundamental behaviors that can help provide a better chance of reaping the rewards of all your hard work. Becoming savvy can take some time, and honing these skills may require you to allocate or reallocate some of your time.

Developing these savvy behaviors will fall into the ‘best use of your time’ category because they are critical career success factors. Not developing or employing them can offset years of sustained effort. Often I’m asked, how savvy to I need to be? Or, how much time do I need to devote to being savvy? We need to be as savvy as our situation demands. Below are descriptions of the savvy skills essential in getting to the highest levels of corporations and staying there. Each component of organizational savvy will be defined to highlight its importance. For a more in depth understanding of how to develop and implement these techniques refer to, Survival of the Savvy

  1. Study Power
  2. Networking
  3. Learn the Culture
  4. Effective Self-Promotion
  5. Detect Deception
  6. Know the Scorecard for Your Next Role
  7. Create an Accurate Perception of Your Talent and Potential
  8. Self Management Skills

See: Testimonials for Survival of the Savvy

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