To me it means that you regret what you did, or said, and you won’t do it again. But for some people it seems more like an insincere confession – you say what you’ve done wrong, get a penance for it, and go off, cleansed, and able to repeat the action if you choose to.

What’s the point of saying you’re sorry for something you regret doing if you just go off and do it again … and again … and again.

Actions speak louder than words and your actions are saying you’re not sorry – well at least not sorry enough to want to change your behavior

There are people who find it very difficult to admit they were wrong. The CEO of my last employer, for example, who believed it was a weakness for a manager to ever admit they were wrong. A strategy that fails miserably as soon as you make an ill-judged decision that has a negative impact on others, but choose to stick with it despite the evidence.

People aren’t stupid. They know when they’re onto a loser, when the procedure they’ve been told to implement is unworkable, especially when they’re much closer to the ‘front line’ than the procedure-maker. And they are likely to resent the fact that their feedback and suggestions are often dismissed out of hand, assumed to be an attempt to get out of doing something, rather than trying to make it work. It’s a sure-fire way to demotivate your people.

As a manager I chose a different route. My willingness to admit I was capable of messing-up, and to ask for suggestions and support when it happened, which was more than once, put my team on my side rather than in opposition. They were willing to offer ideas because they knew these would be considered, and often tried. And they were willing to recognize we had a shared responsibility to make things work – things were being done with them, not to them.

It’s the same with friends and loved ones. You may not have intended to upset someone by your words or actions, but if you did, a speedy apology is more likely to keep the relationship on track, while a steadfast refusal to recognize something went wrong just makes it worse. If you don’t know how you upset someone, ask them. It may be that you – or they – made an assumption that was wrong. But unless you find out, you’ll never know, which makes it more likely that you could do the same again.

It doesn’t always work though. When I left my last job, I wanted to keep in touch with some of my co-workers, and they also wanted this. I sent one person several e-mails, both before and after I left, but never got a response. Disappointed, I sent a mail saying I assumed she didn’t want to stay in touch any longer. This did get a reply – well two actually.

The first was from my ex-manager, saying I had upset my ex-colleague, and asking me to make amends as she had taken it very badly. The second was from my ex-colleague herself, saying she hadn’t replied to my messages as she didn’t want to do this from a work email address, and didn’t have a private one.

I apologized – at length – for the assumptions I had made.  I knew that the whole episode could have been avoided by a very brief email or phone call from her explaining the situation, or she could have asked my ex-manager to tell me, although I didn’t mention this. I suggested we get together when I was next in the area, for a coffee and to clear the air.

Again I received no reply.

The solution was in her hands, as I couldn’t set up a personal email account for her. I sent a couple more mailings over the next new months, but again got no response. So eventually I gave up. It seems I  haven’t been forgiven in this case.

But it won’t stop me. I’m human. I know there is always the potential for misunderstandings between people. And if I think I’ve created one, I’ll say I’m sorry and do my best to learn from my actions.

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Not everyone is a loser in the current economic downturn. The people who prey on the need, greed or gullibility of others are still raking in profits from their scams.

The BBC NEWS website has reported 4 or 5 different types of scam in the last few months:

boiler room operations that suck people in to nonexistent investments and then sell their details on to other schemers so they can try to repeat the process

fake holiday clubs that use scratch card ‘prizes’ in popular holiday resorts to persuade people to  pay thousands for access to services that provide nothing that isn’t freely available on the internet

prize draw scams where the millions you’ve won will be released on payment of an administration fee. And taking this further, duping people to get involved in money laundering in the belief they’re no the way to a big prize

Every day I get several emails from people desperate to give me money.

I’ve either won this in lottery draws I know I never entered, or someone – usually a high ranking government or banking official – put my name forward as the recipient of a large sum of money, if I’d just agree to process an even larger sum through my bank account.

These are so blatantly unbelievable that it’s difficult to understand how anyone would be gullible enough to fall for them, but they do, often losing their life savings before they realize what they’re caught up in. It can sometimes be difficult to feel much sympathy for them.

But I do sympathize with those people who are looking for a genuine home based income and get scammed. These aren’t people who are being greedy or naive, they’re genuine people. They’ll maybe include people who lost their jobs in the recession and are looking for a way to keep some money coming in until they get back on their feet. Or people with commitments that stop them working outside the home. Whatever, they’re not looking for something for nothing.

In the case reported by the BBC the person scammed should have questioned whether £300 per day for filling envelopes wasn’t too good to be true. And parting with money before getting full details isn’t wise, but when the scam is in a national newspaper (aren’t they supposed to check out their advertisers?), alongside legitimate advertisers –  some of whom may also request payments for start-up packages — you can understand that someone could be taken in. And the small amount of money each individual lost to the scammers could mean the difference between paying a bill or going further into debt for some people today.

I would never fall for the email scams but I have been a scam victim. Some years ago we visited a national franchise exhibition, and were interested in a company offering a franchise related to property sales. We had lots of early contact, got prospectuses and legal checks, met other prospective franchisees and had many meetings before we finally signed up. We were provided with expensive marketing resources, supported at exhibitions, even taken on a trip to Spain as part of our induction.

Not for one minute did we ever think the opportunity we had bought into was anything other than 100% genuine. Until the police contacted us and we found out that we had been scammed by a real professional, along with a large number of other people. Last we heard he was in custody, awaiting trial. We were never called to give evidence. Probably because I still can’t work out how the scam was pulled, and find it difficult to believe I was being scammed.

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I was reading the memoirs of a recovering alcoholic a few weeks ago, in which she said that the professionals she met during her rehab told her that it only took 10 days for the body to fully rid itself of the chemically addictive elements of alcohol or drug addiction. As anyone trying to quit alcohol, drugs or smoking knows, it’s not really that easy, because they also need to change the lifestyle, behavior and attitudes that worked to maintain the addiction as well. There’s no point in going through even 10 days of struggle if your personal infrastructure won’t fully support your ongoing success.

But it does make you think: if 10 days can put someone well on the road to recovering from these life threatening addictions, how difficult can it be to change other habits? Is it really impossible to teach an old dog new tricks?

The key to successful change, whether you’re looking at giving up a bad habit or adopting a new one,

Read more about forming good habits

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I was watching the film ‘Pretty Woman’ the other night. Richard Gere’s character, the rich Edward Lewis, was asked by hooker Vivian why he stayed in the penthouse suite when he didn’t like heights. His response: ‘Because it’s the best.’ And the most expensive.

This got me thinking. Just because you can afford the best, should you buy it? Should you buy something that you can’t fully appreciate because it’s the best? Why would you choose this, rather than paying less for something that you appreciate just as much?

Bocca"Marilyn" Sofa - an expensive buy, but is it 'the best' choice?

Conspicuous consumption has a lot to answer for in today’s western society. The need to be seen to possess an item that someone has defined as ‘the best’ has put a lot of people into debt they can’t afford. The desire to be seen as someone who can afford ‘the best’ often overcomes good sense.

Who sets these standards that so many people seem to believe they have to aspire to? Who decides what factors make one item more desirable than another? Why do the many accept the value set of the few?

Most people want to be part of the crowd, which means adopting the attitudes and ‘uniforms’ of the majority. And if you’re unfortunate enough not to be able to afford the trappings of the crowd, you have difficult choices to make:

Read the remainder of Should You Always Buy the Best (aka most expensive)?

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One of the things that can hold you back from achieving what you want in life is your attitude, the way you think about things, the perspective you have on the world and yourself within it.

To succeed and achieve you need a positive attitude … to be able to take the disappointments and setbacks in your stride … to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again. To be happy you need the right perspective on life.

It’s more normal, and perhaps easier, to think negative thoughts rather than positive ones, especially if the people around you tend to be negative. The media spends far more time reporting, and dissecting, bad news stories far more than in promoting good news. In fact although reporters do analyze their story from several different perspectives, they still struggle to find a positive angle in many cases. They encourage people to live in the negative – it sells papers better.

Given this environment, it’s not surprising to hear people claiming that they can’t change their attitude, they can’t get a different (better) perspective on their life.

‘It’s how I am’ you might hear. Or ‘Everyone else is saying that’, or ‘Things never change round here, it’s always been like this and it always will’. All signs of a negative attitude, a perception that does nothing to support the possibility of progress.

How difficult is it to change your perspective?

Come with me on a journey:

I live in a small town that climbs up several hundred feet from the sea to a hill top, then spreads out along it. There’s one road that snakes its way back and forth down the hillside, plus lots of alleys and stairways that form a much more direct, if steeper route from bottom to top.

Just a few steps and a few minutes changes this point of view...

Join me at the bottom of a stairway. Behind we can just see the sea through the crowded buildings. Let’s start up the stairs. Climb for just a minute then we’ll look back. Now we’re in among the rows of houses lining the hillside. We can see some rooftops, and hints of green – trees and shrubs where there seemed to be just houses before.

Let’s go further – just another minute or so. We cross the road where the houses are less close together, and start up a fairly steep, curving alleyway. Looking back we can now see the sea over the rooftops, and across to the opposite shore. There’s the dome of a small church that wasn’t visible before, and the houses are proving to be varied in design and size.

And up again. We’re more than half way to the top already, and another minute puts us in sight of the hill top itself. Now when we turn back we can see the harbor wall stretching out into the sea, and several small fishing and rowing boats bobbing around in the swell. Orange trees and brightly colored bougainvillea grow in small gardens and even smaller courtyards. And in among the buildings we see the signs of time passing –an abandoned house here, a new structure partly built there.

...into this

Finally we reach the top. Rows and rows of tiled rooftops spread out below us, and we can see from the castle at one end of town to the main road at the other. And then we turn around. The hill slopes down again towards the sea on the other side of the headland. It’s less crowded here, with houses dotted among the olive and grape fields. The waves are crashing on the shore far below.

Just climbing a few feet and looking back gave us a different perspective. Each time we had the opportunity to see something different, something new, that added to our knowledge and understanding of the scene.

It wasn’t difficult. All we had to do was take a few steps forward each time, and open our eyes.

And that’s what you need to do to change your perspective, to get the positive attitude you need for happiness, success and achievement. Take a single small step: find the positive in something, or replace a discouraging thought with an encouraging one.

Then do it again…

and again…

and again…

And whenever you encounter a negative thought or attitude, in yourself or someone else. Turn around and move away from it.

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The internet is a great tool when it comes to researching job opportunities, and finding out more about industries and companies you might want to work for. It’s also great for advice on all parts of the recruitment process.

But never forget it’s a double edged sword.

While you’re using the web to research your career development, you current, or prospective future employer is using it to research you.

I used to be employed by an organization that worked directly with young people, and operated alongside several other government and privately funded services. It was part of our code of behavior that we shouldn’t undertake any activity that might be contrary to the aims of our organization, and that we should promote and support the aims of our employer in our dealings with others. No different to any responsible company.

And what employees don’t always realize is that this isn’t an expectation that stops when you walk out the door at the end of the working day.

In some cases there can be a personal dilemma in this. When you’re out for the evening and you encounter someone you don’t know making negative comments about your employer, should you jump into their conversation to challenge their comments, or keep quiet?

In other cases it’s much clearer. Employees who make derogatory statements about their employers or customers on social networking sites shouldn’t be so surprised when there’s some sort of comeback. Surely they realize that once it’s committed to the ‘paper’ of the web, it’s there for eternity, unless they remove it again. And given the nature of the web, you just don’t know who is going to be able to read your spur of the moment ’sound off’.

Google engineer Jon Perlow has developed a system to help GMail users avoid sending those unwise emails at night or weekends, when they might be the worse for alcohol. They have to answer simple math problems before their message can be sent. A definite benefit for anyone who decides to get back at their boss after a bad day.

When you’re being paid to work, then that’s what you should be doing, not social networking or browsing the web. My employer wasn’t unusual in regularly tracking email and internet activity. They found a few cases where email buddies were spending literally hours of each working week communicating with one another, and usually not about anything to do with their work. Not surprisingly, the company was unhappy to continue paying these people.

And while the company were willing to provide free internet access for personal use, this was restricted to times outside normal working hours. Even then, certain sites were barred.

And there are more proactive ways that employers are checking on their staff these days.

There’s always someone around to take a picture when you’re at your worst, acting the fool or whatever. And yes, they are funny, but your employer may not be quite as amused as your friends. If your workmates are discussing your latest posts there’s a good chance these days that your boss will get to see them somehow. It could mean your job if they feel you’ve brought yourself, or your employer, into disrepute. And if you’re applying for jobs it could make your prospective employer consider you a liability.

A recent survey by Viadeo, a business social network, reported that 20% of UK employers had found information about prospective employees from an internet search, and almost 60% of these employers said what they found influenced their recruitment decisions. In some cases they rejected candidates based on this information. These numbers may be small, but you can be sure they will grow.

Think before you click

Image courtesy of http://www.wpclipart.com

Don’t wait till it’s too late. Clean your act up now. If you know you’ve got posts that don’t show you in your best light, do something about it. But don’t stop there — search for yourself and see what results you get. Are you happy they’re positive PR for you?

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It’s that time of year again – the activity and excitement of the festive season is over and quickly forgotten. And somewhere in there you made a resolution to change career this year. Maybe you’d been thinking about it for a while, but it wasn’t until everyone was exchanging their new year resolutions that you really committed to it.

So what happens now?

Ready for a career change but not sure which direction to take?

It’s good you’ve taken the first step of deciding you want to change career, but do you know what you want to change to, or how to give yourself the best chance of success in the current economic climate?

You’ll find lots of useful information and guidance in these articles:

What Career Should I Follow? — What Career Will I Enjoy?

Tips for Successful Job Search

Writing Cover Letters

Completing the Application Form

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