Chapter 6
PERSONAL VALUE

Anytime is a good time to do your inventory and begin to add some personal value. When you have been doing the same job for a while you forget how afraid you were at the beginning. How little you knew? So, except for learning how to do that job better, you quit preparing yourself for the next job. Suddenly, you are given a new responsibility and you realize how much you have to learn. A new job assignment is definitely a time when you should add some value options to become more valuable to yourself and your company. How you value yourself can affect your ability to achieve success in your business and social life. Loss of confidence is often a value issue. Maybe you are listening to the negativity around you. Or maybe you concentrate so heavily on the day to day that you forget that you need more equipment to progress. You should think about your personal value. Periodically conduct a personal inventory and begin to rebuild your personal value characteristic.

How do you conduct this inventory? Obviously, you are not a car, but the Internet has a great deal of help in determining the value of cars. Even dealers use the Internet value ratings. Go to a new or used car site. A value pops up based on the car having the regular equipment for a given model. Then the questionnaire provides spaces to add up the options. These include such things as tires upgrade, wheels upgrade, moon roof, running boards, spoilers and so forth. Each adds value to the base price. Add it all up and the automobile with upgrades has a higher value than the basic model with basic equipment. This is so simple. It also works with people, the options include education, experience, people skills and many, many more things.

Do you know anyone who reacts to new responsibilities by crash programming to acquire the new but necessary skills? Is not this a good thing? Observe and learn more about how they know what to do. Remember, do not be afraid to ask someone successful how they do what they do. If you are sincere, they will sincerely help you and get satisfaction from doing so. Would you not share your success secrets with someone who wants to be as successful? Don't rely on just anybody to build your self-worth. Only the exceptional people will actually try to sincerely build you up. Personal value is of importance primarily to yourself. However, you can recharge your self-esteem if you itemize your value assets just as you do your monetary assets from time to time. Some companies have very good training programs to help people perform better in each new assignment. Many do not offer such things because finding the resources are costly and time consuming and they won't budget the money. But, if you do the homework and find some course, or seminar that would be of benefit to you and the company you might be surprised by the company's willingness to pay for the training. Everything doesn't have to be learned the hard way. You can make a better life for yourself, your company, your subordinates and your superiors if you take the steps to increasing your personal value. You will be more respected! Build your personal value and your financial rewards will come.

There are creative methods for increasing personal value that are so basic and simple, it makes you wonder why everybody doesn't do it. This is easy!

Educate yourself. Whatever your circumstance, find a course, a seminar, a book or whatever tool is available to give yourself a leg up on getting your job done right and efficiently. Don't expect your company to pay for it. This is for you and to increase your personal value. However, if the company is willing to fund this effort, accept their offer. They will get their money's worth.

Train yourself. Find someone who has done your job, or something similar and pick their brains. You won't be trying to imitate what they did. You'll simply find a way to shortcut your learning process.

Educate and train those who report to you. If you have a lot of different responsibilities, assign a person to one of the important responsibilities and encourage them to increase their personal value. If you have the authority, fund their attendance at a seminar. Then have them show you what you have learned by performing that responsibility. As the supervisor, you don't have to know everything, but through your people you should be able to accomplish anything. Also, you will have created a competent member of your staff to whom you can delegate authority and therefore practice your homogeneous assignment ability. And by the way, you'll look like an excellent manager and a genius at personnel selection. Your personal value has just been increased.

Educate and train those who are ancillary to you. How to do this is to suggest to their supervisor, or them directly, depending on the situation to educate themselves to increase their own personal value. Guess who benefits? You!