Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Beyond Work

Beyond Work is our line of resources for people and community leaders looking for something new and innovative outside, be it a new job, career change, or personal development outside of work.

  • Are You A Free Agent By Nature?

    Are You A Free Agent By Nature?

    Do these characteristics describe you and your work/life values?:

    • I desire flexibility in my work (work hours, days, etc.). This is more important to me than the stability of a consistent check or the stable benefits a company can provide.
    • I desire autonomy or control in how work gets done (when, where, etc.)
    • Or to more bluntly sum up the above two bullets, quiet frankly I don’t like other people telling me what to do! I’d rather decide how things get done and be rewarded (or not rewarded) according to the outcomes I decide to achieve.
    • I don’t mind taking risks
    • I have a strong sense of what work is important for me in relation to my purpose and who I am.

    If most of these characteristics describe you, then you may be designed to a free agent instead of an employee. People who seek an arrangement where a particular company does not employ them have been called many things from contractor, to freelancer to self-employed and the number of these types of workers is growing. Do you desire to be one of them? As both individuals and companies desire more flexibility in how work gets accomplished, the trend for a “Free Agent Nation” will continue.

    If the above description fits you, how might you transition into yourself out of an employee role and into a role that allows you to more fully foster the personality and values that exhibit best who you are?

    Here are some tips:

    • Use the Power of 3 Worksheet to help you determine your mission/purpose. This helps you explore your talents, passions and values to set goals, create ideas and identify accountability partners to help you on your pursuits.
    • After defining that purpose, explore avenues where you could live the purpose through providing a service or product that meets needs. Create of list of these ideas.
    • Create a plan, complete with goals, to act on the path you have determined through your mission and ideas.
    • Already doing work you enjoy, but just don’t like the structure that is required in being an employee? Talk to your current employer about how you might shift your relationship to an employer contractor model instead of an employer employee one.   Come prepared with facts that will help show that it will create a win situation for the company.
    • Explore websites that can act as platforms for you to pursue a free agent approach. Here are some:
    1. Etsy
    2. Udemy
    3. Google Helpouts
    4. Freelance.com

    Are you a free agent by nature? What’s holding you back from pursuing this path?

  • Moving BEYOND WORK- Our Company Values

    Moving BEYOND WORK- Our Company Values

    Our challenge this year as a company is creating a scalability framework that can help us drive growth. Beginning this process in 2014 has helped us realize the value of values and of getting them down on paper. We help our organizational and individual clients do this on a regular basis, but have been behind the curve on practicing what we preach!

    Our company values that will drive our growth and services are:

    People First. We believe people are a company and community’s greatest asset. This is why we work to foster passion and productivity in people. We realize that in all our decisions, relationships come first and we help our clients act as leaders by cultivating and building relationships that help drive passion and productivity.

     

    Passion. We believe passion should be a key driver in the workplace. Therefore, we demonstrate passion in the work we do, hire individuals who are passionate about the work our organization engages in, and strive to help our clients discover, develop and maximize their passion through career and talent development processes. In order to help drive passionate decisions, we foster a value for creating self-awareness, developing personal and professional mission statements as well as values that govern mission.

     

    Productivity. Along with passion, we believe productivity should be a key driver in the workplace. We believe passion and productivity go hand-in-hand and also drive quality and results. We demonstrate productivity by saying what we mean and following through on what we say we will do. We think strategically and act on that strategy through setting goals and helping our clients to do the same. We work to foster goal success through proven, behavioral based techniques and tools. We deliver work on time and in a quality manner and put processes in place when necessary to drive consistency in delivery of quality services and products.

    To help drive passion and productivity, we don’t care how or where work gets done, just that it gets done in a way that meets client needs. This coincides with our desire to people first by allowing them the autonomy to make decisions based on their personal preferences. We believe this stimulates passion and productivity.

     

    Continuous Learning. We believe continual learning is a key driver in creating passion and productivity in life and in work. To that end, we invest in the personal development of our people because we know that people are a company and community’s greatest asset (People First). We work with clients who believe in continuous learning and take steps towards continual self-improvement in order to maximize their passion and productivity.

     

    Give Back. We strive to create passion and productivity, not for selfish gain, but because when we are at our best, we help others be their best self as well. We firmly  believe that by letting our light shine, we give others permission to do the same. When people are engaged in meaningful and fulfilling work the community is impacted in a positive way. Because we believe in giving back and in being good stewards of the faith that our clients put in us, we support organizations and causes that work to create passion and productivity by putting people first. This includes educational, entrepreneurial and workforce development initiatives with proven results which improve the lives of individuals, therefore improving the results of companies and the prosperity of communities.

    What are your company’s values? What about your personal values? How do they drive how you think and how you act?

  • What Do You Envy?

    What Do You Envy?

    Are you envious of the guy who has started his own restaurant? What about the attorney who has argued a case before the Supreme Court (this is one of the examples in Quiet)? How about the friend who is a stay-at-home mom by day, painter by night with happy kids and her art in galleries all over the country? Maybe you’re jealous of the teacher who inspires you when she talks with passion about what the students in her class are learning. You wish you had that kind of passion.

    In reading, Quiet- The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, I came across another great question to ask in determining work values: What do you envy?

    We are taught to see jealousy as an unbecoming trait, but the author, Susan Cain, is so insightful in her reasoning for examining what you envy as a way to identify what she describes as your “personal projects.” She states, “Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire.”

    Work and life values should be a key driver of career choice because they impact career satisfaction. There a host of questions (and assessment tools), which can help identify a person’s work values, but maybe the best place to start is by examining a feeling that we are discouraged from seeing as valuable.

    What do you envy?

  • A New Take On Time Management

    A New Take On Time Management

    I’ve been asked by a friend to write a post on time management. It seems fitting at the beginning of each year to look at how we manage our time and “resolve” to manage it more appropriately as we begin anew. 

    But other than this one tidbit of time management advice, I’m not going to write today about time management: How you spend your time should be based on your purpose, and your purpose should be captured in a mission statement to govern how you spend your time. 

    Instead, in considering time management, I think it is worth reflecting on this quote from Raising Self- Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World by H. Stephen Glenn and Jane Nelsen: 

    “Studies of successful, healthy people show that they are consistently good finders who see lemonade in lemons and glasses that are half full rather than half empty.  Incidentally, such people, who are quick to celebrate any little movement in the right direction, have very few problems with burnout and stress.  People who look at what they failed to accomplish during the day, not what they did accomplish, and who go to bed and burn themselves out in stress tend to invalidate themselves and others.  We need to be encouraging to ourselves as well as our children, and celebrate our own incremental successes as we go through life.” 

    So if you want to manage your time wisely, my advice this year: Celebrate your successes, your “little movements in the right direction” and try to do more of it one day at a time. Don’t beat yourself up when you haven’t checked everything off today’s to-do list. Move what hasn’t been accomplished to tomorrow, and go to bed knowing that you did get something accomplished today. My hope is that you celebrate the accomplishments of each day and purposely connect them to something that connects to your personal purpose. 

    What is the best advice you have received on how to manage your time?

    Want some more traditional reading on time management? Here are some recommendations: 

    Books:  Ready Covey: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,  First Things First

    Blogs:  Joseph Lalonde’s How to Improve Your Time Management Skills  (the comments on this post are also good reads)

  • 2013 Year In Review

    2013 Year In Review

    This year, I made my professional and personal goals public in order to demonstrate one effective characteristic of goal setting- going public with them.

    So, did going public help? Here’s how this year shook out:

    Goal 1. Maximize productivity in the morning.

    Result: Accomplished, but room for improvement. I didn’t get up as early as I had planned, and I really owe more credit to this happening to my running accountability partner and my early-bird three year old than I do myself. But, mornings have gone a lot smoother this year.

    Goal 2. Grow company revenue by 30% or more in 2013.

    Result: Accomplished. Revenue growth was 58% (gross profit), Net Income growth was 38%. We have been so humbled this year by the trust our clients have put in us, and the exciting and fun work we are getting to do!

    Goal 3: Cook dinner and sit down as a family to eat at least four times a week. 

    Result: A complete flop. One, I didn’t track it, so I couldn’t tell you how many times we did or didn’t do it specifically, and two, I know we didn’t come close to doing this. We sat in front of the TV with crap food more than I would like to admit.

    Goal 4: Be committed (as I have been the last two years) to one day a week at home with my little boy.

    Result: Almost, but not perfect. Stuck to this for the month of September where so many things hit at once work wise. He went to school three of the four Thursdays in September.

    Goal 5: Express gratitude to those closest to me.  

    Result: Accomplished in the sense that I tracked it this year and was more conscious of how I express appreciation to others, particularly those that interact with daily. On average, I sent one handwritten note to a person each week.

    Goal 6: No debt except our house by the end of the year.

    Result: Accomplished! Accomplishing goal #2 made this happen.

    Goal 7: Read 30 books.

    Result: Accomplished (just barely). Read 30. See Year End Book Review.

    Other year-end review notes:

    Our top blog post of 2013: With almost 25,000 hits: 2 Questions for Striving Servant Leaders