Author: tonycutting

Iwi - Ngati Toa Rangatira, I was raised on Hongoeka Marae in beautiful Hongoeka Bay, Plimmerton, Wellington NZ. Married to Lisa and father of four fantastic kids. For the past 25+ years I have been involved in the recruitment & talent management industries. Most recently I have started to put more focus on my career and business coaching work, helping people succeed is the 'mahi' I really enjoy. In my social life I am actively involved in projects within the sports community with the rest of my time dedicated to my family and close friends.

Find your Motivation then use SMART goals to succeed

Once you have defined what motivates you through working through what you want to achieve in your life, and understanding where you are in terms of your all-around balance between Mental, Physical, Emotional and Spiritual desires the ability to set goals and make plans to achieve them is KEY to success.

Goal-setting will do more to help you achieve the things you want in life than will anything else.

The reward for establishing goals and making plans for them is being able to choose the kind of life you want to live.

Less than 3% of adults have written goals. Less than 1% review and rewrite their goals daily. A goal that is not written is still just a dream.

That means, if today you started writing down your dreams, and specify your goals every day from today forward, you would immediately move into the top 1% of all people!

If you’re in a leadership role, goal-setting is essential to motivating your team. But if you really want to maximise your goal-setting and goal-achieving skills, you must set SMART goals.

This acronym stands for:

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achievable
R = Relevant
T = Time-bound

Most of the problems with goal-achieving are related to a lack of clarity in setting the goal in the first place. With SMART goals, both your personal and business goals will be perfectly clear to everyone.

The other problems will arise if you do not have the right ‘positive’ motivations and or your people are not motivated to succeed.

TEAM ACHIEVEMENT

DEFINE WINNING so people know what they are striving for.

A manager’s job is to ensure his or her people achieve their goals.  If people have been assigned too much, it is the manager’s job to reassess, provide support or distribute parts of the project/task to other members of the team making sure everyone WINS.

You build great teams by getting great results, reward everyone for the win and build a strong team culture.  MAJOR work goals should always have celebrations attached, these MAJOR rewards that acknowledge the performance of the individuals and the team.

Ensuring you motivate teams to achieve this success. 

To get to major goals you need to plan your milestones, each milestone should come with an appropriate award, not necessarily of large monetary value but something that acknowledges the achievement.

Map your project success to the teams individual personal goals and you have the formula for success, retention and a happy work environment.

This all takes planning and the first 5-10% of planning should be identifying what the major goals is, then what milestones you need to get there.

PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENT

Do something every day that moves you towards achieving your major goals.

Go Succeed!

Tony Cutting

If you would like help establishing a strong team environment or developing a meaningful plan for your own success, feel free to call me +6421911722 or email tony.cutting@peoplenet.co.nz and we can discuss how I can help you.  I work with all budgets and have a number of solutions that will succeed if you follow them.

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Personal development on a budget #3

The next book I recommend you invest in if you are truly interested in developing your personal skills – The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference …

Malcolm has written a great guide on ‘how little things can make a big difference’.  In this book, you understand more about the degrees of separation and learn that there is a process that at first can feel quite hard but with consistency, persistence, a focus on quality, and by engaging your mind you will reach that point where life takes off and your hard work pays off.

Turn your ideas into action and let ‘The Tipping Point’ guide you to success.

 

The Tipping Point

 

This book can help transform your thinking and push you in the right direction.

This is one of my favourite business books, I personally recommend it to everyone who wants to build a business or a better life.  I have experienced the ‘magical moment’ when an idea took off like wildfire, and still enjoy using that experience to motivate myself to create more.

Tony Cutting – Coach
tonycutting.com

 

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There are Winners and Learners, nothing else.

If there is one blog I hope my children (and eventually my grandchildren) read I hope it is this one.

Growing up, developing skills comes from experience and learning.  The more we do of both, the quicker we become more proficient at whatever we wish to do.  At times, we learn that something is not necessarily for us, however, if we are put off by other people, or do not give things a go because we are not perfect or proficient the first few times we try then we have not learned this valuable lesson.

Without TRY, there is nothing.  Without persistence, there will never be greatness.

By embracing learning there can be nothing else but success, it is as simple as that.

As parents, grandparents or coaches one of our most important jobs is to install this thinking into those under our guardianship.  With this knowledge, firmly wired into our brains we can create unbeatable people who will go on and do great things.  It simply comes down to “do they LOVE it enough” this is the key ingredient, that will help you persevere through the hours of learning, becoming more proficient, more confident all along learning to be humble along the way. we also simply become better people, more tolerant, more supportive.

It is true, some people learn faster than others, and the better the coach, the quicker you will get to where you want to be. Good coaches make learning FUN, while also embracing the fact there is work to do.  Making it fun encourages persistence.

I was lucky enough to play in some pretty successful rugby (and football) teams when I was growing up as a kid.  I have been in many representative teams and won some impressive competitions. But one team I have very fond memories for was a team where we embraced both ‘Winning and Learning’.  We had a team song we would sing immediately after every game, it was simple and effective.

“We won, because, we won, because, we won, because we won. We won, because we won, because we won, we won because we won …” this would go on for quite some time or alternatively and we purposely would sing this even  louder  and carried it on longer “We lost, because, we lost, because ….” all to the amusement of our supporters and the other team. It also earned us respect and allowed us to move on emotionally and mentally very quickly.

This mental approach enabled the team to get past ‘the learning’ very quickly and we became a stronger team, stronger as individuals and had a blast that year together, sometimes beating teams ranked above us and sometimes learning.  We did not win any championships that year but it was possibly one of the years that made me strong enough mentally to continue on and achieve what I managed to achieve.

This approach is not only great for sports teams and sports people, one of my favourite quotes is from Andy Warhol.

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” Andy Warhol

There is true greatness in this attitude, it takes winning out of the picture and instils learning as the most important skill.  If you can teach your children, grandchildren and most importantly yourself this, you will accomplish what you truly LOVE in life, You will remove the pain of learning, instil patience and persistence and just get on with what you want to do, and is that not what life is all about?

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Personal Development on a budget #2

Once you understand that whatever your age you should be learning, keeping your mind active becomes even more crucial as we grow older.  Committing to personal development will help you stay young and of course provide you with new skills and awareness.

The second book I recommend everyone should purchase and have in their personal library is the number one classic from the late 30’s.  This book written by Napoleon Hill is the standard go-to resource for most modern business coaches.

Think and Grow Rich

Think and Grow Rich

Napolean Hill was commissioned by Scotsman Andrew Carnegie arguably the richest man on the planet at the time, his task, to set about interviewing some of the most successful men in the world.  Through these interviews and subsequent research, he found a common factor which had helped all these people succeed.  This secret appears in every chapter in the book, the trick is for you to find it or maybe, just maybe it will find you.

Again, an extremely affordable book that provides valuable information for all entrepreneurs and people who wish to create wealth.

This is the stuff we should be teaching in our colleges and universities.

Enjoy.

 

 

 

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Personal Development on a budget #1

Too many people do not start down the path of investing in their own personal development as they perceive it to be too expense.  Or they feel they know it all or are too old to get into this personal development malarky…

Lesson one – we are never too old and we should always be spending sometime time each week working on the most important person in our lives – us.  With the knowledge we can help those we love, otherwise, we may just be adding to the problem.

Over the next series of blogs, I am going to share some of my coaching secrets and provide you with great tools at low, low cost to help you get started on your personal development journey.  I just ask if you like the blog please share it with your friends and family whether they be close enough to talk with or connected to you on LinkedIn or Facebook.

If you’re on a serious budget, I recommend you start to read, yes read.  If you don’t like reading – get over it.  Just start.  Once you have read a book you really like and you ‘Feel’ (you know deep down in your gut, or in your heart) that there are valuable lessons in it, read it again and right down the lessons learnt or highlight within the book.  Then share it with the ones you love and talk about it.  Teaching is a great way to learn!

#1 My personal go-to resource I use to sort out my clients thinking about money, wealth and debt.  This gem saved my bacon and I personally make sure all my children read this when they start their first part-time jobs as teenagers.  Of course, they need reminding a few hundred times afterwards but at least as a parent, we have done our jobs.

It costs less than $US 10.

The Richest Man in Babylon.

The Richest Man

I promise you, this is the book I recommend to all my clients, friends and family.  I read it once a year and just re-enforce the lessons from within.

You will love it.  Give it a read then visit my website and let me know what you think.

Take Care and ‘Live the life YOU design’

Tony C (Coach)
tonycutting.com

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What if I don’t know what I want to do for a career?

Firstly, don’t let yourself stress about this.  In my experience, most people do not actually know what they want as a career. It makes you no better or poorer than those who do.  What’s important is what you want to get out of your life.

There are many coaches who would tell you to keep asking the question of yourself each night just before you go to sleep.  But my approach is a little different.  I never knew what I wanted to do as a career, but I did know what I did not want to do and it all worked out fine.

Where I think you can make a big difference is to allow yourself to dream, and dream BIG, don’t let anyone or anything influence what your dream life could be.  The next step is to get your dreams down on paper.  Notice I said get not write.  You see our minds work with pictures and the best way to activate both your logical and creative brains is to picture what you want.  I use Mind Maps but if you do not like drawing (then a visual board might be your thing).

Look up Mind Mapping it is worth having a play and seeing what you come up with.

Your first drawing/board should be massive, filled with all the dreams and desires you want your life to be.  You then slowly start to prioritise the dreams until you have the amount started to picture what is most important.  Then set about achieving your dreams, whether that be acquiring new skills you need or “Just doing” something every day that gets you closer.  The dreams should be massive, it should feel daunting otherwise, you are not stretching yourself and your living in the “safe” and frankly “boring” zone.

Again, don’t stress if you still have not worked ut what your career is going to be, it may be that your life is bigger than a career, yes you will need money.  But, if you are motivated to achieve your dreams you will take jobs and do things that make money.

When you are ready and you have the things you want to really achieve in your life, then find help.  A coach, mentor (not necessarily a family member or friend, they tend to have their own ideas for you).  Ideally, a trained personal coach who can guide you when you need guidance.

Love your life and design the life you will love.  If you don’t everyone else will do it for you.

Take care and have a great day.

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Use Collective Marketing to grow your business

Collective Marketing is the commitment of a group of businesses with a common agenda to build a marketplace, using a structured form of collaboration.

In New Zealand we see collective principles at play all the time, we use it to negotiate pay, create co-operatives that provide the collective of businesses buying power and we see it in many professions where a group of doctors, accountants, lawyers etc. work together to achieve more.  Farmers in our country own the most successful collective ‘Fonterra’ our number one business.

We see collectives forming with organisations that would normally be seen as competitors i.e. Why does a McDonalds sit next to a KFC who is beside the Pizza Hut?  Simple they create a marketplace where people looking for fast food can come.  By attracting people collectively to one place each has a better chance of securing more customers.  It is also handy when you have fussy kids like mine who refuse to eat the same things.

Large businesses have the buying power due to their size, but through leadership and sensible management, a group of small businesses have as much chance to create buying power but even more powerful than that, they can also use the power of collective marketing to help them build their business.

My Projects
In Kapiti (My home) we are building a marketing collective ‘Kapiti Now’ using the internet (website) and social media (Facebook and Twitter).  We have grown to 40+ businesses in a year and we meet monthly to discuss marketing using the mastermind approach.  We have a good core group of people who are really starting to understand how being in the collective works.  By using Facebook there is a simple way of helping each other that takes but a few minutes a day.  Midway through last year we also set up a regional collective Wellington Today which has added something different.  The Wellington Today Facebook marketing site is rocketing along but we struggle to get more than a half a dozen people along to each meeting.  I have no doubt the regional project will be very successful but it does seem that small local area projects are important to get the ‘networking and marketing meetings’ to a level where people really value them.  These local groups will also be helpful in educating business people to why they should make the effort to travel to the regional group meetings.

The Wellington Today Facebook marketing site is rocketing along which gives great value to the members of the group regardless of the lower turnout to meetings, it seems by being involved in both my clients get the best of both worlds.  I have no doubt the regional project will be very successful but it does seem that small local area projects are important to get the ‘networking and marketing meetings’ to a level where people really value them.

Everyone learns from each other and we are lucky to have attracted a number of coaches who really help to add value to our groups.

Business is being done through the relationships and our businesses are really starting to understand what marketing is all about.  We teach modern marketing approaches at the meetings and compare with each other what seems to work well.

Longer term we will look at collective bargaining to buy marketing to really push the group expanding to other forms of media.I am keen to here from other business people who are interested in starting up a collective in their community, the benefits are great and the opportunity for establishing mastermind groups creates a wonderful personal development framework that is affordable and just as importantly FUN.

Your invitation to work with us
I am keen to here from other business people who are interested in starting up a collective in their community, the benefits are great and the opportunity for establishing mastermind groups creates a wonderful personal development framework that is affordable and just as importantly – its FUN.

In New Zealand I am in the process of establishing the Kiwi Business Network which basically is the collection of collectives, enabling a national approach to collective marketing.

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Your biggest battle…

Are you winning the most important battle you need to win, the first stage is to start understanding you are already on the battlefield?

Most of you reading this possibly already know where I am going with this subject. However, it is one thing to realise our biggest battle will always be with ourselves, and another thing to do something about it. When we are young most of us have parents to guide us, and if we listen we start to learn good habits that help us get the most out of our lives.

As we grow older we now depend on our own judgement, for those of us who do not continue educating ourselves and understanding how to get the best out of the tools we have been blessed with we can start to struggle.

In terms of my personal life, I was very much a teenager up until I hit 27 years old. Single, and very independent I really lived life to the max and it took a serious health scare to jolt me into thinking more about the future and the responsibility I had to look after myself, and in my case, that meant spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically. I was fortunate enough to take some good advice and visit a wonderful naturopath/osteopath Derek Pratt who really helped me start to understand what looking after your body and soul meant. At this time I was introduced to meditation and started to experience a difference in how to look after yourself.

Then throughout my thirties, life changed dramatically for me, now married and a father I battled with the change this meant and it took another serious intervention (in this case a broken ankle) for me to realise I had to change some of the old habits that were preventing me being a great father and husband. Six weeks at home I started to realise how much work being a parent was for my lovely wife. Plenty of challenges but loads of wonderful memories as we built our family and I started my journey into building a business.

Into my Forties and now with a full family (four beautiful children) and a flourishing business. I think, I really had responsibility nailed, in fact when my business hired the thirtieth staff member. Then my old foe arrived and hit me again … I started to worry “Feeling responsible for thirty families, making sure we continued to win more business and looked after everyone became a burden on me” I still had some growing to do.

In my early Fifties and I am finally realising how powerful our minds are. I am now starting to understand more how the mind works and realising that we can control our thoughts and focus positively. It really is our choice, you see the mind has a job to do but it tends to run riot if we let it. We can train our minds using tools like meditation, visualisation and will, while also understanding the truth is not in your head, be aware your mind is processing thousands of thoughts every day and it does not differentiate between good and bad thoughts, happy or sad, what’s right for you and what’s wrong with you – it just processes everything your senses take in i.e. Garbage in = garbage out.

If you want to find answers to what you should be doing, those live inside your heart. Eat well, exercise each day, meditate or take time for yourself alone, look after your body, soul and spirit and they will help you win the battle with your mind.

Live the life you would love to live. Be positive, be grateful and have fun and don’t let your mind run around your head like an untrained monkey (as the monks call it).

Have a great day

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The future of recruitment – update Feb 2017

The Problem with today…

HR Managers try to stay up to date with the latest HR trends but seem to struggle to find ways to sell and create truly diverse teams within their organisation.  Yet they are the very people who have put in place the very systems and processes which make this even harder.

The majority of recruitment teams in New Zealand (And likely around the world) have taken a massive step backwards and we have lost many of the countries truly skilled recruiters due to the ridiculous processes, so-called solutions like the governments ‘AOG’ preventing any new solution from being looked at for long periods of time (Not a smart move in a world where technology and the re-engineering of processes are moving at breakneck speed).

Ironically recruitment in the 1980’s and early 1990’s was more efficient and effective than what is being used by most organisations today.  You see back then advertising was run by large newspapers who had staff with decades of knowledge, understanding the importance of branding and positioning – not a simple on-line job board that you post your current job to, then sit and wait for great talent to call.

Newspapers albeit too expensive pushed branding campaigns, stories and positioned your adverts so as to reach an audience who was actively seeking work as well as entice passive readers to consider working for your brand.  Their reach was phenomenal and they dominated the marketing landscape with loads of content that attracted a diverse range of people to pick up a paper and read.  Jobs for accountants were featured in the financial sections, IT jobs in the Infotech weekly section all filled with content that pulled in the right eyes and target community.

Today our employers seem to think we will just look them up on the web.  They may invest heavily in branding on their own website that really only reaches the people who care about these pages – themselves.  They spend little on pushing out the brand to the communities they want to attract. “But we put our job on Seek”

This is where I apologise to the small number of organisations who actually proactively brand their organisation and push out solid employment branding campaigns.  The challenge for them is finding the right media to be effective, there is just no one community like the old newspaper that does this job anymore.

Simply throwing and expensive video on each advert you place on Seek just does not cut it – sorry, you are still only pushing out to the desperate and dateless who need a job. What about the passive person, you know the one that would really help your organisation improve its diversity add that value you were really looking for?

The future – in my eyes

So what would be the best solution? One that combines the marketing power of the old newspapers (which gave you a  lot more than just news, the content appealed to a wide variety of people, solid branding campaigns, human interest stories, humour and sport, local events – great stuff).  I think on-line community “newspapers” will start to appear and take advantage of the proactive marketing principles those wise old newspaper people of the 1980’s knew all about, creating marketplaces that appeal to all facets of the community.  I have been playing with this idea with my projects kapitnow.co.nz and wellingtontoday.co.nz and the initial results have been outstanding.  However, it is not perfect – yet.

These will be helpful but will not for organisations who need skills and talent beyond the reach of these marketplaces.  This leads to where the future really lies for Recruitment and its been happening for awhile and we would already be there if the so-called ‘Strategic’ HR people had not slowed its progress through some pretty poor decision making (apologies to all my ‘Strategic’ HR friends).

You see for me the future is proactive recruitment.  Do not wait for the people you want to apply for jobs, find them, get to know them and hire them.  This immediately solves the diversity issue as you can target whatever person you want with this approach. Forget about “We must advertise to make it fair for everyone” a chef just is not right to develop your system’s code and these days unless you advertise on every site available, then you are just not being fair. Not everyone looks at Seek and the real talent certainly is not searching for a job, they are going to get tapped by someone like me searching a database.

LinkedIn has been leading the way in terms of real future based solutions that enable smart proactive recruitment, it just has some major financial flaws (It’s too expensive for most hiring managers to use).  About.me is also heading in the right direction but it does not appear to capture the data needed to allow for solid searches.  However, About.me will help those recruiters who become very familiar with advanced Google searches to find talent affordably.

So for me the ultimate future based recruitment system is one that allows you to market to the communities you want to find talent (branding, employment branding, organisational success stories) as well as uses simplified smart queries on all the ‘People’ databases being created around the world as well as the personal websites which will no doubt prolificate as people realise the advantage of having your very own website gives you for future employment, contracting and consulting.

Unfortunately, this will not apply to my system jobcafe.co.nz as our firewalls are effective enough to prevent these types of searches – but this may not be a good thing long term.

So the future is a smarter search engine that can interrogate all ‘talent pools’ on the web and the web itself,  the realisation we all should have great personal websites will become more obvious to people, so will joining communities that enhance their search ranking.  Smart employers will brand, and market themselves in marketplaces like our site

Smart employers will brand, and market themselves in marketplaces like our site kumaravine.co.nz celebrating Maori and Pasifika success or our other project possibility.net.nz targeting and promoting people with disabilities.  These are real communities that bring a significant diversity of thought to an organisation.however, this content will change, it may include job opportunities but is also likely to be more about brand activity, organisational success, culture and ‘why’ when the recruiter or hiring manager comes proactively calling you should connect with them.

Government Agencies may still be placing job adverts but most other organisations will realise this is a waste of money.  And the great news, real recruitment skills will return and processes will become sensible. Find, attract, engage,

Find, attract, engage, nurture and leverage your talent.

By the way, unless you own the business you’ll probably be a contractor or consultant.

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Ingrid Moonflower

The history of the Moonflower family A long, long time ago, in fact over ten thousand years ago, on an Island somewhere in the south Pacific Ocean was a beautiful enchanted forest.  At the middle o…

Source: Ingrid Moonflower

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