Tom-Healy.com » Work/Life Balance

College Success Tip – Take Care Of Yourself Physically

Tom Healy — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:18:21 +0000

You have probably heard of the “Freshman 15” – this is where you gain 15 pounds your freshman year from eating junk food, not working out and crashing one too many parties. Everyone knows about it, but somehow most people are unable to avoid it. There is a happy medium between having fun and taking care of yourself, so just like everything else, make sure that you have balance.

A couple easy rules to follow so that you can take good care of yourself:

• Workout at least 3 days a week (this could include running outside, going to the gym or playing an intramural sport)
• Eat healthy (its OK to cheat once in awhile, but educate yourself on proper eating habits so that you know the types of foods to avoid)
• Get into a routine (have a diet, workout regularly, go to bed and wake up at the same times)
• Don’t do drugs (they are a waste of money and brain cells)

If you are in good physical shape you will feel better about yourself, be more active, get more done and feel better mentally. Your physical health will also have an impact on your classroom performance as well.

The Bottom Line: It might be tempting to get into some poor habits with your new found freedom, but make sure you are staying balanced. Getting out of shape is much easier than it is to get back in shape, so create a good routine that balances having fun and taking care of yourself.

Searching for and Recognizing the Best Career Opportunity

Tom Healy — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:42:27 +0000

As a young professional, there are two ways to do your career search – the easy way or the right way. Most people choose the easy way and many of those people end up bouncing around from job to job because they keep making the wrong career decision and don’t follow the right process. Those that do things the right way put themselves in a much better position and are able to find an opportunity that will take them to where they want to be professionally. It is all about knowing what the process is and then committing yourself to following it – the extra time you spend up front could literally save you years of your time and make you millions of dollars over the course of your career.

So what is the correct process? There are 7 things you must do if you want to give yourself the greatest chance for immediate and long-lasting success. They are as follows:

- Build a Network: Surround yourself with the right people who can help you reach your vision as quick as possible
- Find Something You Enjoy: If you aren’t passionate about it, don’t do it
- Begin with the End in Mind: You must visualize what your successful future career looks like so that you can ask yourself whether or not the opportunity you are interviewing for will get you there the as quickly as possible
- Fight through Adversity: You need to persevere through the difficult time of your career search, which will almost certainly come up
- Demand Excellence: You can either settle for OK over and over again, or take the time necessary to demand excellence once and be off and running towards your vision of success
- Know Yourself and Be Yourself: You have to know what you want and be yourself throughout the process; those that try to be someone else and “impress others” end up in a career they don’t enjoy because they were so focused on being who they thought the company wanted, rather than being themselves
- Make it Just Like College: The students that love college the most are the ones that choose the campus that feels like home, not the one that statistically looks good on paper; make your career search the same way and choose the organization that you feel gives you the best chance to learn, grow and reach your vision

For a much more detailed look at this process, as well as a step-by-step guide to finding a great professional opportunity, pick up a copy of my book The Course They Forgot to Offer – How to Make Big Money, Have Fun & Love Life as a Young Professional.

Why Every Young Professional Must Have a Vision of Success

Tom Healy — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 08:38:39 +0000

The first step in being successful as a young professional is to determine what you would like to accomplish in your personal and professional life. Understand what you are truly passionate about and what would give you excitement every single day. To accomplish this, two factors are completely necessary right now: having a commitment to being successful and knowing what you must accomplish in order to feel successful.

If you were building a skyscraper, would you just start laying down materials or would you need a blueprint that specified how everything needed to look? If you were going to start a business, would you have a business plan or just cross your fingers and hope you made money? Your life is no different – your blueprint or business plan is your vision of success and it will guide you throughout your building process towards success.

The sooner you can create a well defined vision of what success looks like to you, the sooner you can begin working towards your goals and dreams. Don’t get stuck with the majority of young professionals who wake up, go to work, go home and repeat this process five times a week with no idea what direction they are headed in. If you are waking up in the morning without any reason for going to work other than to pay the bills, you won’t be very motivated, and your day-to-day activities will not have much purpose. If you aren’t inspired or motivated by anything, your days will be longer and less enjoyable than the days of someone who has a meaningful purpose and specific goals in mind. The same holds true for your personal life; without strong relationships and involvement in a variety of activities you will have trouble feeling a sense of purpose.

The biggest mistake business owners make is spending too much time working in their businesses and not enough time working on their businesses. They are involved in the day-to-day grind and aren’t able to take a step back and look at how they can run more efficient and effective businesses. The same principle applies to your life; it is easy to continue through the daily grind instead of questioning things. It is essential, however, to take that step back on a regular basis and to evaluate what you are doing well, what areas you must improve on, and how you can more efficiently accomplish your goals. This is otherwise known as your vision of success. Having a clearly defined vision of success will allow you to remain focused on what you want to accomplish while never losing sight of your true desires.

If you were to randomly ask 100 young professionals what their visions were for success in life, I would bet 95 of them would look at you with a blank stare and be initially speechless. How scary is it that the vast majority of young professionals are unable to tell you what they are trying to accomplish in life, either personally or professionally? I have found that the young professionals without a well-defined purpose or vision had no idea what they were working toward, if anything at all.

The sooner you can develop your vision and know it by heart, the more likely you are to have daily, monthly and yearly actions that are propelling you in this direction. The more clearly defined your vision is and the better you understand what you need to do to accomplish it, the more likely you are to make decisions that will lead you to your dreams.

You must be able to clearly explain to anyone what your vision is for your future and what is necessary for you to feel successful in life. When people ask you where you see yourself in 10 years, they will be amazed at how clearly defined your vision is for yourself. They will admire you for this and probably be jealous at how well you have things figured out at such a young age. Once they understand your vision, they will also be impressed at how your actions consistently align with your goals. Create your vision and work towards it every day – starting today!

Young Professional Success Tip – Start a Business

Tom Healy — Mon, 30 May 2011 07:54:01 +0000

Let me make something clear; this doesn’t mean that you need to write up a 50 page business plan, raise $100,000 of capital and try to invent the “next big thing.” This simply means that as a young professional you should offer a product and service to other people. Determine what you are passionate about and offer it in the form of a product or service. This doesn’t need to be your primary source of income and you may even offer it for free initially. Figure out something you are good at or enjoy doing and find a way to offer it to others. By doing this, you are building something you enjoy, and it won’t even feel like work at all. Imagine if one day you could make enough doing this thing you love, that you wouldn’t need to do anything else. So many people across the country have become “accidental entrepreneurs,” meaning that they started to do something they loved to help others and began getting paid to do it. The next thing they knew they were making enough to pay their bills and decided to do it full time. The bottom line is that you will never know until you try, so give it a shot!

Young Professional Success Tip – Choose The Right Place to Launch Your Life and Career

Tom Healy — Thu, 19 May 2011 08:50:21 +0000

As a young professional you typically have less holding you back than you will later on in life when it comes to choosing where you want to launch your life and career. This provides you with an incredible opportunity to choose the perfect place for YOU. The factors you must consider when choosing where to live as a young professional:

People – Do you want to be as close to your family as possible? Did you make a pact with your high school friends that you would all move back home after college? Are you and some college friends all moving to a certain city together? Is your boyfriend/girlfriend already living somewhere?

Money – Are you at a point financially where you feel as though your only option is to move back home? Do you want to move to a big city but can’t afford to even split a studio with your income? Are you being offered twice as much money to start your career in a certain city?

Location – Do you need to be near a beach? Or can you not live without the lights and sounds of a big city? Do you need to be on the mountains and ski as much as possible?

Education – Does a school 1,500 miles away have the best program in the country? Is your field of study only offered in certain parts of the country?

Industry – Is it easier to become an actor in Los Angeles than it is in Omaha? How difficult is it to be a ski instructor in Miami? Are you at an advantage to choose one location over another based on your industry?

With those factors in mind, you will need to choose if you want to live at home, live on your own in a familiar city or relocate to a completely different city. The best advice I can give is to consider your options extensively, and don’t make a quick decision based on one of the five factors. Weigh them all and remember that you are only young once – being a young professional may very well be your best chance to try something new and relocate to an exciting new place!

Young Professional Success Tip – Take Exceptional Care of Yourself

Tom Healy — Mon, 16 May 2011 08:18:45 +0000

While you are working to strike the perfect balance between your life and career, you cannot forget the importance of taking care of your body. If you overextend yourself and don’t take proper care of yourself, you will become less productive and more stressed, regardless of how hard you work. Some simple and effective rules to follow:

• Eat healthy foods, avoid lots of carbohydrates and sugars (do some research if you need to)
• Work out regularly, at least 3-5 times per week (again, do some research on the proper amount of physical activity)
• Eat consistent meals throughout the day (don’t skip on meal and eat a huge one to compensate, or vice versa)

The best things you can do are find information on eating healthy, work out and take care of your body. Find out how often you should work out, how to create a balanced diet, how many hours per night you should sleep, and learn other great practices for living a healthy lifestyle. Believe it or not, you can either increase or decrease your chances for success significantly based on how you treat your body. Abusing yourself and running yourself into the ground could crush your chances of reaching your vision of success, while taking exceptional care of yourself can definitely give you the energy and boost you need to get where you want to be more quickly!

Young Professional Success Tip – Embrace Failure

Tom Healy — Thu, 12 May 2011 08:04:29 +0000

I LOVE to fail! OK, that isn’t entirely true…. but I do like the learning opportunities that failures provide. As an ambitious young professional, you are going to fail, make bad decisions, do the wrong thing and be stupid plenty of times. The important thing that will determine if/when you reach your vision of success is how you deal with these events. You must know how to embrace failure and learn how to turn every negative thing that happens to you into a positive. Being able to do this will significantly speed up your learning curve and make you a better person and professional.

The only way a failure is ever really a failure is if you don’t learn from it. Once you learn from it, you are a smarter, more experienced person who will never make that mistake again. That is how you make failure a good thing, not a bad thing! Those who put their heads down and react negatively to failures will end up making the same mistakes again and again in the future until they end up learning from them.

Let failure be a learning lesson that takes you one step closer to reaching your vision of success!

Young Professional Success Tip – Have Balance

Tom Healy — Mon, 09 May 2011 08:57:14 +0000

Balancing your life and career sounds easy, but will more than likely be difficult for you if you have set big goals for yourself. You will be focused on building your career, learning as much as possible, having a social life, spending time with family and all of the other things that are important to you. A few of the many things that will be pulling you in different directions:

• Career
• Family
• Social Life
• Faith
• Community Involvement
• Volunteer Work
• Plus sleeping and eating!

Chances are good that you have a strong desire to be successful at everything you are involved with, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. So how do you balance all of these items and spend the appropriate time on each? Here are a few suggestions you can easily do right now:

• Prioritize what is most important to YOU
• Develop a manageable routine that allows you to do it all without being stretched too thin
• Build in time each week to relax your body and mind
• Give yourself time during the year to rest and recharge the batteries – weekend road trips with minimal sleep don’t count!
• Don’t be scared to turn your work email off on the PDA during nights and weekends

Everyone is going to want a piece of you and of your most valuable asset: your time. Co-workers, charitable organizations, kids, friends, family, a significant other, people you are mentoring and many others will all want to be around you. You must give each of those parties the time they need and deserve, but not anything above or below that. You simply cannot give the same amount of time, or access, to each person. Know what amount of time you need to spend with certain people and doing certain things, then build a balanced calendar that allows you to appropriately balance it all. This won’t be easy and is a constant work in progress – the important thing is that you do your best and focus on having balance.

Young Professional Success Tip – Understand Wealth and Control Your Finances

Tom Healy — Thu, 05 May 2011 08:56:21 +0000

Now more than ever, it is critical for you to understand what true wealth is and have control of your finances. Most young professionals have no financial plan or strategy, which ends up costing them significantly in the future. Our current national savings rate is negative, which means that the average person spends more than they make. Nevermind saving for retirement, building an emergency fund or saving for a childs college education – most people aren’t even making enough to cover their bills!

I have bad news and good news:

BAD NEWS – Financial uncertainty is a huge cause of stress and anxiety right now for millions of people.

GOOD NEWS – It is easily avoidable, especially for young professionals with time on thier side.

There is a huge misconception that wealth is determined by how much you make, the cars in your driveway, the size of your house and how expensive the watch on your wrist is. Wealth isn’t measured by what you MAKE, it is measured by what you SAVE. Cars are a depreciating asset (they go down in value), homes fluctuate in value and people won’t pay you nearly what you paid Best Buy for the flat screen TV on your wall. The point I’m making is that your wealth is what is in your bank account, plain and simple. In my book The Course They Forgot to Offer, I lay out a simply financial plan for all young professionals to begin immediately and practice for the rest of their lives. It will show you the easy way to build wealth, regardless of whether you make $30,000/year or $300,000/year.

Make sure to educate yourself on personal finance and work with a professional advisor – don’t be like the average America who spends more than they make and takes more time to plan a vacation each year than they do planning their finances (I’m not kidding!).

Young Professional Success Tip – Do What You Are Passionate About

Tom Healy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:00:27 +0000

Life is simply too short to waste on doing something that you aren’t passionate about for a living. As a young professional, you have the amazing opportunity to do whatever you want, live wherever you want and make the absolute most out of life. Wasting it in a career/industry that doesn’t excite you or make you want to jump out of bed every morning is a huge mistake. The last thing you want to do is look back one day and realize you would have been a lot happier had you chosen to simply do what you are passionate about and let the rest fall into place.

The most common reason that young professionals do not do what they are passionate about is because they believe they have to make a choice between making money and following their passions. If you fall into the category of feeling pressure to choose, and feel as though you can’t make money doing what you love, then don’t worry. It’s not your fault that you weren’t taught how to make money while following your passion.

There was a study done in the 1970′s at Harvard where graduating seniors were asked to choose one of the following:

A. I want to try to make as much money as possible now, and one day I’ll be able to do what I am passionate about

B. I am going to do what I am passionate about and hope the money follows but will be fine if it doesn’t

A total of 1,500 students participated in this study. A total of 1,245 chose option A and were focused on trying to make as much money as possible regardless of what they were doing. The other 255 decided to follow their passions and see what happened.

20 years later, the students were asked one question: Are you a millionaire? Of the 1,500 students, a total of 101 had become millionaires within 20 years of the study. Of the 101 millionaires, a whopping total of 1 student came from the group of 1,245 that chose option A. The idea of this study is simple. Regardless of whether you want to attempt to get rich or do what you are passionate about… you need to do what you are passionate about!!

The bottom line is that you simply need to do what you are passionate about so that you can enjoy your life. More than likely, you will end up making a lot more money in the long run and you’ll have additional time to spend on the things that are most important to you. Follow your passion and you will create an amazing life for yourself!