Insight on Finance

Getting out of your comfort zone

"The word 'safe' is an adjective meaning secure and a noun meaning an enclosed locked container. If you’re living the adjective then you’re living the noun."– Steve Pavlina

There's no room for adventure and excitement in your comfort zone; in fact, over time you might feel overwhelmed and trapped by boredom and fear. Perhaps it's time to stretch those limits a little! Not only will your life become more exciting, but you'll also build confidence and improve your luck.

Comfort is easy. We fear uncertainty, loss, pain, and so we seek to cushion ourselves against the rawness of life by spending our lives in artificial, climate-controlled boxes safe from unwanted intrusion.

Powerful forces conspire to keep you in your comfort zone, penned by fear. The system wants you to be compliant, following the rules of the group, being an accepter rather than a creator. Fear of social judgment discourages you from trying anything with a risk of rejection or failure. Capitalism and consumerism encourage you to build a career by mastering a single money-making skill and devoting your life to it.

Through the two-part strategy of making the comfort zone comfortable and everywhere else uncomfortable, we are pressured to remain within our comfort zones: cozy, content, cloistered.

This is unfortunate. Personal discovery and personal development happen only outside your comfort zone.

Comfort zones foster an attitude of learned helplessness, making progress harder. Learning, creating, growing happen only when you step outside your fortress and venture into the wilderness.

To get out of your comfort zone:

• Bring awareness to your comfort zone and your natural tendency to stay inside it.
• Change your frame of mind. View your comfort zone not as a shelter but a prison. Embrace constructive discomfort. Don’t take the safe, known path. Choose challenge over comfort, and set goals that force you to get out of your comfort zone. Learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
• Gradually expand the perimeter of your comfort zone. Lean into the discomfort. Don’t sprint out of your comfort zone, take small but frequent steps. Push the walls out, don’t try to knock them down.
• Periodically check your progress to confirm that you’re going further out over time.

As your life continues to improve it will become easier to expand your comfort zone, because when you’re happy, optimistic and confident, you’ll be more inclined to take risks and live adventurously.

Today's Activity

• What will your life be like in ten years if you stay within your comfort zone? What if you instead continually expand its boundaries?
• Examine your life goals. Will they require you to go outside your comfort zone? Or have you limited your goal setting to things that you can do comfortably and safely?
• Today, do something outside your comfort zone. Wear a ridiculous costume, tell jokes to strangers, sing the names of each stop on the subway.

Reference: www.howtolive.com

Are You Listening? - Listening Skills

“Just be yourself!” Has anyone ever said that to you? I heard it all the time when I was a kid, followed by assurances from my mother that everyone would like me if I could "just be myself".

And you know what? She was right! What I’m told over and over again in my travels as a trainer and as I interact through social media is that people love my authenticity. I “show up” as who I am, whether I’m on stage or off. I’m honest about my faults as often as I am about my strengths. And I’ve found that people feel like they know me and can communicate with me because of it.

The other thing I consciously do which I believe assures people of my authenticity is so simple it’s almost crazy. I ask questions and, more importantly, I listen. That’s it.

One of the keys to authenticity is realizing that, sometimes (believe it or not), it’s not about you. You see, as members of the human race, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we think it’s all about us. Especially if you’re enthusiastic about your company and its products/services and all it has done for you, sharing that from your perspective is natural.  The problem with that is, the person you’re talking to wants it to be about them! 

As a Company Representative/ Public Relations, your most important job is building relationships. You do that through conversation and the best way to build a strong, positive relationship with another person is through supportive communication (which means they feel important and heard). 

I want to say a word here about listening skills. Most people don’t truly listen when they’re in conversation. Oh, they may nod their heads and seem as though they’re listening, but truthfully most conversations consist of both people waiting for their turn to talk (because deep down we believe that what we have to share is infinitely more interesting than what the other person is saying). Of course, it’s not polite to do all the talking. So, in most conversations, we pause now and then and let the other person talk. But most of the time, we’re not really interested in what they have to say. If you switch to what I call heart-centered listening, you get very focused on what the other person is sharing (and frankly, forget about yourself). 

So why not make the conversation about them? Shift your focus to curiosity and away from asking for anything. If you’re curious, you’re bound to ask questions, which will lead the person with whom you’re talking to share. 

When you’re curious & you make it all about them, your authenticity shines through. It’s impossible to be curious and listen to someone else if you’re not also being authentic. And believe me when I tell you, people can tell the difference between being truly listened to and talking to someone who’s is just marking time, waiting for their turn to talk. You know you can tell the difference. 

When you shift your thinking to this perspective and you learn to authentically listen, you’ll find you magically begin to get everything you need. It’s a truly incredible phenomenon.

Public Relations
Weekend Green Jobs
feel it. learn it. share it.

Purchasing became “Sourcing”, and then “Strategic Sourcing”.

“Strategic sourcing is a systematic corporate/institutional procurement process that continuously improves and re-evaluates the purchasing activities of a company. It is one component of supply chain management. While most organizations implement strategic sourcing initiatives for the purposes of saving money, other reasons for implementing strategic sourcing include improving supplier performance and minimizing risk.”
As Purchasing evolved into Sourcing, so did the ability to measure its value.

Many companies now spend more than half of their operating costs on direct materials, indirect materials, and services, with manufacturing companies typically spending between 50 and 70 per cent of revenue on direct purchases.
 

·         In many markets, customers expect prices to drop or remain flat while quality or capability increases.

·         Investors expect EPS (earnings per share) to continue increasing while prices remain flat and while the salaries of talented executives steadily increase.

SOURCING VALUE SUMMARY

Value Measurement	Value Definition	Capture Method
PPU - Price Per Unit	Lower unit costs	Simple Auction
TCA - Total Cost of Acquisition	Lowest Landed Cost (includes freight)	Adjusted Auction
TCO - Total Cost of Ownership	Lowest Usage Cost  (includes indirect cost)	Decision Optimization
TVM - Total Value Management	Highest Value to Cost Ratio (balances risk vs. cost)	Integrated Decision Optimization

Widely Accepted Sourcing Standard - Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

PRO's
TCO takes into account all direct costs (such as PPU, transportation, tariffs, etc.), indirect costs (product utilization costs, switching costs, transaction costs, etc.), and quantifiable market costs (quality, brand, etc.). In essence, it captures every cost associated with the product and provides a total usage cost. TCO is often considered the best comparative cost metric.

CON's
Although TCO is significantly better than TCA, (which is better still than PPU), it is still a very cost centric approach. When misunderstood, TCO can distract sourcing professionals from their ultimate goal, which is optimizing the supply chain from a total value perspective and insuring that each sourcing project yields long term gains, and not just short term cost savings.

Strategic sourcing is sourcing for value. It’s concerned with finding the right price, not the lowest price. Sometimes value is gained by selecting a lower cost provider, and sometimes value is gained by selecting a higher cost provider with greater quality and reliability.
 

TVM insists that all value-based measures and costs are included in the model, thus minimizing potential risks. Sourcing based on a TVM approach is easily obtainable for all organizations – especially ones already following a TCO approach.

SPEND MONEY STRATEGICALLY {YOURS OR OTHERWISE}

aXcelerate Sourcing amrut.nerlikar@axcelerate.in

Google Trends - Online Shopping

Google Pie Chart API

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