In partnership with local LifeSuccess Coach Leslie Flowers, Ascent Adventure Consultants is presenting the LifeVenture Weekend Retreat in Cary NC January 22-23 2010.

The weekend LifeVenture retreat begins on a Friday night, lasting until Saturday evening, and combines Leslie’s excellent LifeSuccess teachings, (http://www.lifesuccessleslie.com) with experiential training and application by Ascent Adventure Consultants’ (http://www.ascentadventure.com) professional team building and training facilitators, to help participants learn and apply the principles being taught. Read the rest of this entry »

It is hard to find hope in these times of uncertainty.  What feels like an almost constant stream of bad news can cause anyone to have doubt about the future.  Or you may be a person who fears change even in the most stable of times.    If either of the statements sounds true, you may be suffering from learned helplessness.  The good news here is that there are tools for overcoming learned helplessness.  This blog entry will define learned helplessness. Future entries will give you tools for dealing with it.
Learned helplessness is the condition in which a person has learned to believe that they are helpless in a particular situation. They believe that they have no control and that whatever they do is futile. As a result, the person will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when they actually have the power to change their circumstances.
Many people will suffer from learned helplessness at some time in their lives.  One example would be you have a talk with your manager where he or she appears angry at a trivial subject.    You are puzzled by the exchange, feeling there is nothing you can do about it.  Learned helplessness can occur in far more serious situations.  A study shows that most people in a disaster situation will do nothing until instructed to do so.  A person can learn to be helpless through the observation of another person encountering uncontrollable events even if the observer has not countered it themselves.
Learned helplessness can be a minor issue that occasionally keeps you from making decisions confidently.  Or it can be a significant problem that is keeping you from realizing your professional or personal potential.  So how does knowing about learned helplessness assist you?  The answer is found in the concept of your Explanatory style.  We will explore this concept in a future entry.

You can read about someone’s experience with Learned Helplessness by clicking here and visiting their blog.

This post was authored by Danny McCracken, a guide and trainer for Ascent Adventure Consultants.

We got a great mention in the Dancing Elephants Achievement Group Newsletter this morning:

Every year starts anew and how great is that? We get to start off with a clean slate, learn from our mistakes and take new chances.

This year was no different. We have teamed up with Brandon Hensinger with Ascent Adventure Consultants, LLC and developed a series of training sessions called, “Ultimate Sales Training”. While we actually teamed up with Brandon last year, we had a successful launch last week with “Cold Calling for People That Hate to Cold Call”. It was fantastic! I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in this mixture of classroom and experiential training. The sales training from Tim was exemplary (as always) and Brandon had us smiling and laughing at ourselves as we learned where our pre-conceived notions took us.”

-Deidre Hughey

There’s a corporate communication strategy model that I have found to always be so helpful. When I train clients on this, they are amazed at this simple concept. This is adapted from the book “Corporate Communication” by Paul Argenti. When you as a business owner, or marketing executive, or sales person, or PR representative, set out to communicate to the public, how do you evaluate whether or not your message is being responded to in the right way? Do you evaluate whether or not your message is being responded to in the right way? Here is a good feedback loop to apply. First, it is important that you know what a constituency is: the person to whom the end or object of the communication refers. 

The Business/Organization

1. What do you want your constituencies to do?
2. What resources are available to make them do it?
3. What is the businesses image/perceived image?

Messages/Images

1. Decide on your communication channel
2. Structure message carefully

Clients

1. Who are your constituencies?
2. What does each constituencies think about the organization?
3. What does each constituency know about the topic?

Constituency

1. Did each constituency respond in the way the organization wished?

NOW BACK TO THE BEGINNING (the Business/Organization stage). Use the responses from the constituencies to change your message, and keep going through that process and you will develop a great communciation strategy model.

I like what this author says over at the Corporate Communications Blog:

The true communication model of this type of relationship is no longer the unilateral and passive communication of television broadcasts. The new communication model is participatory, the free-for-all of the town square, the public forum, the market place in the sense in which that term was understood in ancient times, as illustrated by the way in which many town squares were called simply “Market Square”, a place where exchange, discussion, encounter would take place; in short a true meeting place of humanity in all its diversity.

No matter what kind of business you’re in, and no matter how long you’ve been in business for, creating a social media presence is an absolute must in today’s market. If you want to reach the market in the way they prefer to hear and receive information, you need to start your social networking strategy today. I have seen remarkable results from my taking action on this, and I recommend it to you.

Deidre Hughey, founder of The Buzz Builder, is the best resource you can find to get your strategy launched. Check out her website.