On Monday, April 16, during the 11 PM airing of Los Angeles’ CBS 2 News, Daisy appeared in a segment about women and their careers versus men and their careers. If you missed the broadcast, take a look at Daisy’s interview on the subject…you might be surprised at the findings in this feature! Watch Now

Why did 620 people show up in Silicon Valley to see and hear founders and leaders of some of our favorite Internet companies talking with well-respected teachers of mindfulness and neurosciences specialists last month?

The outstanding reason that these technologists and mindfulness leaders were in the same room is that those who work the long hard hours to innovate and produce profitable companies realize that a clear mind — a focused mind — is a creative and innovative mind. And there’s a good dose of philanthropic energy there too since many of those great minds have amassed the wealth with which to change the world and many of those successful people in Silicon Valley actually want to change the world for the better. It turns out that a calm and mindful approach is highly correlated with a compassionate and peace leaning mind. So if the folks in Silicon Valley, the people who have created the very things that have changed the way do business and life are paying attention to this, shouldn’t you too?

How do you clear your mind to increase focus and be more innovative in your thinking? How do you press pause when the work and life you lead is draining you dry? Think the person who snapped at you (or was that you who snapped?), the boss or coworker who just stole your idea and threw you under the bus are aware of their impact? Could a little more kindness in your life make for more effective collaboration and genuine communication?

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This is a great piece on Introversion and Extroversion. We can all get along so long as we pay attention to, and appreciate, our differences.

Heard on All Things Considered

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I’m Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I’m Audie Cornish. From Gandhi and Joe DiMaggio to Mother Teresa and Bill Gates, introverts have done a lot of great things in the world. But being quiet, introverted or shy was sometimes looked at as a problem to be overcome.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: If you’re what they call a shy guy, you’re standing on the outside looking in. You might have something to contribute to their conversation, but nobody cares whether you do or not. There’s a barrier, and you don’t know how to begin breaking it down.

CORNISH: In the 1940s and ’50s, the message to most Americans was, don’t be shy. And in the era of reality television, Twitter and relentless self-promotion, it seems that cultural mandate is in overdrive.

A new book tells the story of how things came to be this way, and it’s called “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” The author is Susan Cain, and she joins us from the NPR studios in New York to talk more about it.

Welcome, Susan.

SUSAN CAIN: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here, Audie.

CORNISH: Well, we’re happy to have you. And to start out – I think we should get this on the record – do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert?

CAIN: Oh, I definitely consider myself an introvert, and that was part of the fuel for me to write the book.

CORNISH: And what’s the difference between being an introvert versus being shy? I mean, what’s your definition?

CAIN: So introversion is really about having a preference for lower-stimulation environments – so just a preference for quiet, for less noise, for less action – whereas extroverts really crave more stimulation in order to feel at their best. And what’s important to understand about this is that many people believe that introversion is about being antisocial. And that’s really a misperception because actually, it’s just that introverts are differently social. So they would prefer to have, you know, a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to going to a loud party full of strangers.

Now shyness, on the other hand, is about a fear of negative social judgment. So you can be introverted without having that particular fear at all, and you can be shy but also be an extrovert.

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Job Seekers, Be Creative and Flexible

In 2012, creativity and adaptability will be key to landing and keeping a job for many workers, as staff levels remain lean and employees are expected to respond to a wide variety of demands, experts say.

Economists don’t expect loads of job growth, but there could be opportunities in areas such as health care, professional services, retail and some manufacturing, says Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown University. Also, continuing churn in the labor market means that even in areas with few new jobs, there will still be openings when workers move around.

Technical knowledge and experience will be required for certain spots. “For professional services you usually need a professional degree. In health you usually need some training,” Mr. Holzer says. “Manufacturing needs some occupational training. Retail is different. It doesn’t require specific occupational training, but it does often require some interpersonal skills.”

In addition to the standard prerequisites, employers will be looking for workers who are able to quickly adapt to new responsibilities as companies respond to changing economic and industry trends. So workers should highlight their creative skills to differentiate themselves, says Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University.

“Firms have so many job seekers per opening. They are going to want candidates with clear credentials, but also a little extra shine in interactive skills and creativity,” Mr. Katz says. “They are less willing in a weak labor market to take chances.”

Here are other skills experts recommend workers should pick up and enhance.

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What a great opportunity to get your hands dirty in an entrepreneurial venture. During this time of change in our economy this is a life changing opportunity.

Ivy League senior Ethan Carlson recently turned down a job with a global-energy consulting practice and instead pledged to spend two years working for an entrepreneur, perhaps with a focus on renewable energy, in a struggling U.S. city.

“I want to make an impact not only on myself, my career and my finances, but also society around me, and my local community,” the 21-year-old mechanical-engineering major at Yale University says.

The project he plans to join, Venture for America, was founded by Andrew Yang, the former chief executive of Manhattan GMAT, a test-preparation company acquired in 2009 by Kaplan, a Washington Post Co.

Venture for America says it was inspired by Teach for America, which places recent college graduates at schools in low-income communities for two years. This summer its first crop of about 50 “fellows” will be placed at small businesses such as Drop the Chalk, an education-software firm in New Orleans, and Andera Inc., an online-account-opening firm in Providence, R.I.

The companies will pay participants $32,000 to $38,000 a year, plus health benefits. The program includes a five-week program at Brown University that mimics training for consulting and investment banking.
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There is increasingly obvious evidence that slowing down to a quiet stop on a regular basis increases well being and even happiness. Do we really have to live life with such stress? I don’t think so. We just need to prioritize a little quiet into our days to realize this. Try it.

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
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Can’t find a job in LA? You might to look in another country…

Making a Play for Video Gamers

It took Abdulrahman al-Zanki, then 14, a few weeks to develop his first game, Yellow Taxi, and upload it to Apple iTunes in 2010, learning from written instructions between school hours and homework. Since then, the Kuwaiti teenager has created 22 more iPhone games in less than two years, including the highly popular Doodle Destroy.

“I really love making iPhone games, but I can’t wait to make some real video games for the Xbox, PlayStation 3 or Wii,” Abdulrahman said during an interview last month. “What I really liked about Doodle Destroy was that it had a lot of downloads. I hope that whenever I create a game, it reaches the top charts.”

Investors and game-making companies are counting on the talent and passion of young people like Abdulrahman to help build a vibrant Arab gaming industry and conquer a share of the potentially lucrative market.

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Daisy Swan – Career Coach
Guest Contributor for My L.A. Lifestyle

They’re inevitable, right? The five or six holiday functions that we feel we must attend, like it or not. Well this holiday season, why not look at those holiday happenings in a different light? Use them to your advantage, to further your business or your career. Look at these functions not only as networking opportunities, but as a way to focus in on what you might want to be doing – or doing differently – in the New Year.

Read the whole article here

We all need to be developing our talents, expanding our repertoire and acceptance that things won’t be going back to the old ‘normal’. Look for the opportunity and build toward new horizons.

It’s the Economy: The Dwindling Power of a College Degree

The 2012 presidential election can be seen as offering a choice between two visions of how to return us to this country’s golden age — from roughly 1945 to around 1973 — when working life was most secure for many Americans, particularly white, middle-class men. President Obama said his jobs plan was for people who believed “if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would be rewarded.” Mitt Romney explained his goal was to restore hope for “folks who grew up believing that if they played by the rules . . . they would have the chance to build a good life.” But these days, many workers have lost a near guarantee on a decent wage and benefits — and their careers are likely to have much more volatility (great years; bad years; confusing, mediocre years) than their parents’ ever did. So when did the rules change?

It has been hard to keep track. Over the past four decades, we have experienced the oil embargo, Carter-era malaise and a few recessions. Mixed in were the thrills of the late 1990s and mid-aughts, when it seemed as if you were a sap if you weren’t getting rich or at least trying. But these dramas prevented many of us from realizing that the economic logic was changing fundamentally. Starting in the 1970s, labor was upended by a lot more than just formal government work rules. Increased global trade devastated workers in many industries, especially textiles, apparel, toys, furniture and electronics assembly. Computers and other technological innovations had an arguably greater impact. While factories continue to make more stuff in the United States than ever before, employment in them has collapsed.

Computers have hurt workers outside factories too. Picture the advertising agency in “Mad Men,” and think about the abundance of people who were hired to do jobs that are now handled electronically by small machines. Countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, e-mail and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs. This is also true of trades like plumbing and carpentry, in which new technologies replaced a bunch of people who most likely stood around helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly.

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Good News About Hiring Trends for 2012!
Time to Re-Energize Your Job Search Activities

Large employers plan to increase their hiring of college graduates finishing their degrees in the 2011-12 academic year. The trend continues an uptick that began last year after hiring declined during the recession and the early part of the recovery, according to a new survey by Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute.

Big firms – those with more than 4,000 workers – plan to hire 6% more graduates than last year.

Smaller companies, with fewer than 500 employees, are hiring, but cautiously. Those firms said they plan to add an average of 11 workers each, essentially the same as last year, the study reported.

The weak spot in the hiring outlook for new grads is mid-sized organizations with 501 to 4,000 employees, especially state and local government agencies. Hiring for recent grads will decline by 3% for those employers.

“We’ve had a problem in the mid-sized group for quite a while,” said Phil Gardner, director of research at CERI and the study’s author. When the economic crisis hit in 2008 and 2009, he said, the vulnerability in the segment came from “second- and third-tier suppliers, consulting companies, firms that rely on big companies for contracts,” while local government hiring remained strong thanks to stimulus funds from Washington.

But the trend has reversed in the last year as stimulus dollars dried up. Private companies are starting to bounce back, but with parks closing, school districts’ budgets frozen and public agencies making cuts across the board, this once-robust source of jobs for young people is contracting.

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