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Up Your Downside
In today's world, the only constants are change and uncertainty. With change and uncertainty comes risk. Since risk can only be mitigated, never eliminated, everything has a downside. How low or deep your downside exposure will be depends upon your level of resilience. If you are self employed, a solopreneur, a small business owner or an independent professional - Read This Book.
In today's complex, uncertain world, a lot of things can happen to disrupt your business or livelihood. This book is all about helping you to create resilience by design. By being resilient, you are likely to be impacted less by any unexpected event or disruption. During a disruption, with resiliency, you are likely to fall a shorter distance before being able to once again gain some traction.
This book contains two distinct parts. The first contains a series of essays written by selected members of Mike Jay's 2007 Resilience Program. Each member wrote about their own experience with the concept of resilience. In the second part, Mike Jay identifies 64 elements and then offers 64 strategies the small business owner and independent professional can undertake to increase their resilience. For each element, there is a survey question for the reader to answer. Your answer to each question can be computed into a numerical score which you can use to help you prioritize which strategies you to address and in what order. As you move up through the elements, they become more complex, obscure and theoretical. But don't let this intimidate you.
To build your resilience, work on your priority elements first, followed by those you understand. Since we cannot predict what the next problem, crisis, calamity or unforeseen issue will be, the future requires you to be resilient and adaptable. The more vulnerable you are, the greater the event or crisis will impact you.
Developing your resilience will up you downside. Use the elements in this book to increase your professional/business resiliency. When the s___ hits the fan, you'll be glad you did.
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Good Times Don't Last Forever
'Good times' don't last forever....yet, people want to believe they do.
Like the turkey who believes good times are common place until the third week of November, most people expect the good times to roll on. And so, they only see what they are looking for. Even their stockbroker won't tell them that "when in doubt, get out."
Yet, if you understand that there are business cycles, you look for the unexpected and thus see the unexpected when it surfaces....long before others do.
Mike Jay is a futurist and makes his living by helping others see what they are blind to. In his new book, Jay answers the question: In tough times, what risks should we avoid and which should we snap up?
Our ability to recognize and react to today's unexpected events is key to both our growth and survival. As business entrepreneurs, we must have enough knowledge to plan and anticipate, yet enough street savvy to know when things are going unusually right or unusually wrong.
We're talking here about really big surprises -- like discovering that one of your products is selling much better than expected -- and you don't know why ...or... discovering that you are selling to the wrong customers ...or... that your product or service needs to be revamped from top to bottom ...or... even discovering you are in the wrong business.
What comes next could be scary. When the social mood trend changes from optimism to pessimism, creditors, debtors, producers and consumers change their primary orientation from expansion to conservation. As debtors and potential debtors become more conservative, they borrow less or not at all. As producers become more conservative, they reduce expansion plans. As consumers become more conservative, they save more and spend less. A downward "spiral" begins, feeding on pessimism just as the previous boom fed on optimism.
The resulting cascade of debt liquidation is a deflationary crash. What better reading material is there than "Upping the Downside"....as we in the U.S. begin the long climb out of a period of depression, or at the least a few years of recession?
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The perfect book at the perfect time
As our economy is slipping into recession, this book is truly being released at the perfect time. When the economy is strong and times are good, resilience can be somewhat automatic. When times become tougher, what protects us is the resilience we have designed into our life. This book will help you identify the areas of your life that leave you open to problems and help show you ways to design a life that is more resilient and can help you weather most anything this economy or your life brings.
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Upping the Downside with Self Knowledge
"Take various ideas like Gallup's strength-based development, a world of uncertain economic outlook, and a healthy dose of slack. Mix in the brain pan of a professional's professional. Marinade for 10,000 hours of business and executive coaching. Toss with essays from eleven authors. Pour into the metaphoric mold of professional resilience. Serve Upping the Downside warm."
What I have typically been missing from personality tests in the past is the next step, the application of this new knowledge to affect my behaviors. While I wouldn't quite consider Upping the Downside to be a personality test it does encourage self-reflection around the 64 strategies and more importantly it guides and encourages changes in your systems and network rather than attempting to change your personality.
I've been working my way through a digital pre-release copy and am consistently impressed by the depth of the chosen metaphor of professional resilience. The book is split into two distinct, yet interrelated, sections. The first section is a collection of essays from eleven other authors on the topic of professional resilience. The second section is Mike Jay spiraling us deeper into the rabbit hole of self-reflection -- all the while maintaining the focus on resilience and how to develop it while maintaining our own identity, talents, and strengths.
So what is resilience? Resilience is the ability to continue in the face of unexpected challenges. This is different than planning for every eventuality by virtue of the unexpected aspect. One of the keys presented in Upping the Downside is slack, and not the lackadaisical avoidance of responsibility popularized by the Church of the Subgenius. Jay presents the concept of slack in more of an engineering frame: the difference between the level at which a system is operating and its current maximum operational capacity. If you are running near your maximum capability then you don't have much slack left in order to respond to unexpected situations. And the more efficiently a system performs the more likely there will be enough slack to respond appropriately.
I have not yet reached the full depths of my own resilience rabbit hole, especially considering this is a lifelong mindset change rather than a single event. Even with only having made it through five of the eight sections in the survey I have identified several areas of improvement in my own systems -- not my self. I'm quite excited to fully experience working within my strengths and talents. I've already begun developing my systems and leveraging the resources of others in my network to shore-up the areas that are not my strength or talent.
How much slack do you have in your life?
Where could you use more support in order to live your life more fully?
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The Definitive Guide To Resilience!!
Mike Jay's UPPING the Downside contains a rich body of specific steps, strategies, and resources designed to help you literally be ready for ANYthing! That's what true resilience means. This book should be on every professional's desk and in every couple's home. It really is the definitive guide on resilience.
I'm deeply grateful for the day a girlfriend introduced me to Mike Jay in early 2006. She told me of his profound mastery of assessments and unique style of developmental laser coaching.
I'd been a coach for a big name speaker for a few years before that, and had become real disillusioned with the world of coaching. (I couldn't understand why so many of my clients didn't do what I told them to do! I later learned this was prescriptive coaching, which is really consulting).
And, even as a Success Coach, I was having financial, career, and relationship challenges. I kept trying to fit myself into a mold that I thought society (my family, husband, peers, friends) had made for me. Not very resilient, right?
It wasn't until I immersed myself in Mike's trainings and array of assessments that I discovered and began to really own my true strengths. Through this newfound self-knowledge that both my husband and I engaged in, we were able to dramatically increase our acceptance of ourselves and each other, and to then design ways to transcend our differences. We literally transformed our marriage.
I went on to attend Mike's yearlong Resilience Club and, as a result, I'm proud to be a contributing author in UPPING the Downside. My chapter is called "The Hardy Couple" and is specifically about relationship and marriage resilience.
When we're faced with more challenging economic times, the marriage and family unit can suffer from untold severe stresses and pressures. Now more than ever we need to stick together, rise to the challenge, and create resilient relationships. I believe hardiness in the home begets hardiness in the workplace.