Happy Anniversary to Me . . .

I'm excited!

One year ago we started our blog experiment. We were in the process of renaming and rebranding my company - changing the name to The Kevin Eikenberry Group. As we developed the concept for our new website we thought we wanted to include a blog, but we decided I should try it first.

So we tried it. Starting on March 22, 2204.

365 days. 130 posts.

A few weeks ago I posed a question in email to my team. It read something like:

"The one year anniversary of the blog is coming up. Do you think we should celebrate in any way? If so, what are your thoughts?"

The ideas they had were fabulous... and as you read the rest of this post you will be the beneficiary of their ideas . . .

First Gift

When I started writing this blog I wanted to share something of value, and in reviewing these posts over the last couple of weeks I think I have acheived that. You can judge for yourself, because our first gift to you - for visiting to help us celebrate is our Best of Blogs Special Report. Since this is a PDF file, click to open it, or right click and save the file if you want to read it later,)

Holly Powers read through all of the posts, selecting one from each month to include in this collection. Thanks Holly for your help.

We hope you will benfit from this Special Report and will choose to share it with others too.

Second Gift

The first five blog readers (that is you) to call and talk to me today (and they have to tell me they were reading the blog - I'm not giving products away to the guy trying to get my phone business). You will be able to choose from one of the five products listed below:

Becoming a More Effective Team Member Learning System
Effectively Managing Projects Learning System
Being More Creative Learnng System
Understanding and Mastering Change Learning System
Effective Internal Consulting Skills Series (there isn't a link for this product yet on one of our websites, so I'll have to tell you about it if you are one of the first five callers.)

I appreciate you reading our blog and hope that you will continue to do so. I look forward to talking to some of you on the phone today. (You can reach me at 317.387.1424 or 888.LEARNER in the U.S.)

Pick up the phone!

Just Five More

Reading the March Training + Development Magazine, I saw a snippet on focus from Sam Horn's book, Tongue Fu. IT describes an acronym using the letters in the word FOCUS to provide five tips.

I loved the first one - the F.

"Five more rule. If you are in the middle of a task and want to give up, just do five more: Write five more paragraphs, read five more pages, work five more minutes. Working past the point of frustration helps build mental stamina, just as not giving up when your body gets tired helps build physical stamina."

Let me add a couple more "fives" to this great idea...

- Try five more times to help an employee who you are losing patience with.
- Find five more possible solutions with the brainstorming session is winding down.
- Count to five before responding to a Customer who has frustrated you in some way.

Add to your focus by adding your own fives in areas you most want to focus.