Coaching Blog
The Coaching Group Of Switzerland

By  Jaleh Bisharat, Co-founder and CEO, NakedPoppy.

There’s no such thing as a slow day when you’re an entrepreneur.
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To me, the most anxiety-producing days are the ones where a lot of people need my time. These are days filled with a never-ending stream of meetings, calls, requests, and interactions  —  with little time to reflect in between. And when the work backlog keeps rising, and I don’t have a minute of “think time” to myself, it can be easy to start operating in a reactive (and not proactive) state.

I love people. I actually thrive when managing teams. But part of being successful is finding ways to remain calm and clear during hectic moments of the journey. When my days get crazy and difficult to manage, I use a series of productivity hacks, mental tricks, and other strategies to make sure I’m achieving progress, not simply motion.

Here are some of my favorite strategies for staying grounded and productive during a hectic day:

By Glenn Leibowitz
The other day, I was walking out of the elevator lobby of my office building and looked outside the front doors. I stood for a few moments to look at the streaming white and yellow light from the sun pouring through the entrance to the building. The sky was blue that day, and was mercifully clear of the depressing blanket of gray haze that has too often blocked the sky.

By Shelley Zalis
​I always say a woman alone has power; collectively we have impact. Traditionally we have been taught to be competitive with one another, because there was such a scarcity of jobs at the top. It’s so clear that strategy doesn’t work. The truth is that raising each other up and channeling the power of collaboration is truly how we’ll change the equation—and have a lot more fun along the way.

There is a boys’ club where women never felt comfortable, so we decided to create a Girls’ Lounge more than six years ago where everyone feels like they belong. We discovered two things:

1. There is power in the pack.
2. You realize your strengths make the table better.

Today we’ve connected more than 17,500 corporate women and female entrepreneurs, and evolved the name to The FQ Lounge, where women are still the majority, but men feel welcome and comfortable.
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We need to reverse the stereotype that women don’t support other women. There is research that shows women in particular benefit from collaboration over competition.  Study after study shows women who support women are more successful in business.

By Richard E. Clark and ​Bror Saxberg
Motivation — the willingness to get the job done by starting rather than procrastinating, persisting in the face of distractions, and investing enough mental effort to succeed — accounts for 40% of the success of team projects. Yet managers are often at a loss as to how to effectively motivate uninspired employees. Our review of research on motivation indicates that the key is for managers to first accurately identify the reason for an employee’s lack of motivation and then apply a targeted strategy.