Connecting: Awareness essential for personal power in business life

Marlene Chism, president of ICARE Presentations in Springfield, works with companies that want to build strong business relationships and with individuals who want to be better communicators.

Welcome to the new year. It's time to quit smoking, lose weight and become the best that you can be. If you are still feeling tired, overworked and frazzled from the holiday activities and you want to regain a sense of personal power, consider the following tips.

Increase your awareness

Awareness is the No. 1 tool for gaining personal power. As Phil McGraw says, "you can't fix what you don't acknowledge."

Just last week I followed up with a businessperson that had requested a packet of information. My call was acknowledged with a harsh sounding, "Hello!" that sounded more like a good cussing than a greeting. In a state of shock, I paused and said, "Wow, it sounds like I got you at a bad time," to which she replied, "Yes, I'm busy, what do you want?"

I had to believe that she was totally clueless about how she is perceived by others. I'm also certain that this tone and manner affects her employees, as well as her potential customers. In business, what you don't know will hurt you.

Some of us are more conscious of these things in our professional lives, but the lack of awareness can also leak into our personal lives.

For example, several months ago I listened to a message I had left on our home machine. Although I had not intended to sound anxious or angry, when I listened to it I was shocked at my tone and inflection.

What keeps us from being aware: Our lack of being fully present. We are multitasking, in a constant rush or otherwise too preoccupied to be in the current moment. To paraphrase Louise Hay, "the power is always in the present moment." We need to slow down and recognize our choices.

Slow down

There is a prospect that I met at a convention who asked me to follow up about a speaking engagement. With each call, I reach a frantic woman who is out of breath as she scurries about to gather her papers and rush out the door for a meeting she is already late for. There is always a fire to extinguish or an emergency to tackle.

She has apologized profusely at least three times with promises that she will be available if I will just call her back or give her another chance. Yet time and time again, she refuses to set aside five minutes to block out a time on her calendar when we can actually connect.

Simply slowing down for a moment would save lots of time and eliminate much of the anxiety she is experiencing. There is no personal power in hurry and worry, yet, certainly if she thought she had other choices she would exercise them.

Recognize choices

Technology has given us so many choices that we are like kids in a candy store. We have only one dollar to spend but we want everything in the store. We spend our time deliberating over choices and feeling the stress of lost opportunities instead of making decisions and living with that decision. The result is procrastination, over stimulation and a general sense of frustration.

We do not understand the power of exercising conscious choices, because we are too busy trying to do it all and have it all.

For example, on any given day you can see someone navigating through traffic with a cord stuck in his ear as he conducts business via the cell phone.

If you are guilty as charged, consider these two questions:

How much attention can you really give to that person on the other end of the line when you are also concentrating on traffic?

How many times have you dropped the ball because you were multitasking and forgot to write something in your planner?

Many people feel that they have to be accessible 24 hours a day.

The same people often complain of being overwhelmed, overworked and under too much pressure. The solution is to exercise conscious choice. Become the master of technology instead of being enslaved by it.

Use the cell phone as a tool to check your voice mail. Set appointments for phone calls instead of playing phone tag and putting additional pressures on everyone else. Check e-mails twice a day, and instead of procrastinating and complaining, simply make some decisions, answer the mail and be done with it.

Once we become aware of these patterns, we can slow down, recognize our choices, get out of the rat race and reclaim our power.