8 Ways to Be Re-inspired At Work 06-11

8 Ways to Be Re-inspired At Work

After a while, some people get complacent or dissatisfied with their company. Here are eight ways to find that magic again.

Doing the same thing day in and day out can grow tedious and make you feel stagnant. Often you may feel in a rut. Even entrepreneurs get bored and lose the spark they had with what was once an exciting adventure.

Well, just because the thrill is gone doesn't mean you have to quit and move on. There are ways to get re-inspired and once again enjoy going to work. Here are eight of my favorites.

1. Talk to Your Customers

Your business must be providing some value or you wouldn't have customers. Spend some time conversing with them and let them tell you why they like your company. You may gain some surprising insights that will help give you daily purpose.

2. Research Your Competition

There's nothing like a little competitive action to get your interest back on line. See if your competition has left an opening that you can exploit for expanding your market share. You'll get to play detective, strategist, and hero all at once as you knock off the infidels.

3. Change Positions

Perhaps you are too settled in the position you currently have. Look for the opportunity in front of you. You may need to boost your education or improve the way you handle people, but personal growth is the most stimulating activity. And if you succeed in advancing, you'll have plenty of rewards to show for the effort.

4. Create a Lunch and Learn Program

People get excited when they get to teach others. A lunch and learn program will create interactions that benefit your colleagues, make you all smarter, and at the same time will remind you of the interesting and stimulating things in your company and industry.

5. Change Roles With a Co-worker

Whether you are boss or co-worker, you can learn a ton by sitting at someone else's desk for a few days. The newness will give you a fresh perspective and open your mind to new ways of thinking and ways to improve. You may also gain new appreciation for your colleagues.

6. Take on New Responsibilities

Investigate the needs in your company that have fallen through the cracks. Picking up the slack will give you a new way of contributing and will make you feel good for resolving a problem.

7. Recruit New Employees

Spend a few weeks finding A players and telling them all the good reasons to work at your company and you'll begin to remember the reasons you love it as well.

8. Plan Your Preferred Future

Perhaps you forgot what inspired you to take this path in the first place. Maybe it's time to reconsider and explore so you can recommit. If you tried the suggestions above and still feel disenchanted, try taking some time to rethink your preferred future and make a change. Start by exploring your core values and follow your heart.

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10 business courses we wish they offered in college 09-10

10 business courses we wish they offered in college

September 10, 2012: 8:37 AM ET

By Martin Zwilling

FORTUNE -- I'm sure that every one of us who has been out in the business world for a few years can look back with perfect hindsight and name a few college courses we should have taken. What's more disconcerting to me is that I can name a few that weren't even offered, and more than a few students who graduate ill-prepared for the real world!

I won't even try to cover here the ones you didn't find for your personal life, like managing personal finances and credit. But on the business side, here is my list of useful courses that we wish existed, but as far as I know, still aren't generally available:

1. Basic Office Politics. Office politics involves the complex network of power and status that exists within every business, large and small. Don't you wish that someone had prepped you on how to read the body language, interpret office gossip, and when to hit the delete key on your email rather than the send key?
2. Business Writing for Email. Writing in business is not the same as in an academic environment. In school, you're taught to stretch weak ideas to reach your document page limit. The business world expects exactly the opposite. The challenge is to communicate your idea in one page, and close the deal quickly without a big slide presentation.
3. Touch-Typing for Dummies. How many hours a day does the average professional and executive today spend hunched over a computer keyboard "hunting and pecking"? Throughout a career lifetime, just think of the return on that investment.
4. Dress for Success. "You are what you wear" works in business, just like it did in high school. But no one tells you the business norms, so Gen-Y'ers come to work in jeans, baseball caps, tattoos, flip-flops and expect to be treated as executives.
5. Demystifying Business Logic. Another term for this is how to be a skeptic. Understand the ways people can mislead deliberately or accidentally with numbers, bad logic and rhetoric. There's some untruth hidden in 99% of everything you're told. Can you find it?
6. Business Budgets and Benefits. The focus here would be on the actual nuts and bolts of how things get budgeted and financed in business. This will pay big dividends in getting your favorite project funded, or justifying your own salary, or negotiating a bonus.
7. Business Sales Techniques. We can find tons of "marketing' courses in colleges and universities but everyone must think that "selling" is intuitively obvious. The art of selling is complex blend of relationships, persuasion techniques, negotiation, and knowledge.
8. Root-Cause Problem Analysis. Business professionals need to analyze problems from a big picture perspective. Most classes in college focus on a narrow area of interest, which just teach students to focus on problems through one lens. That's how unforeseen consequences go unforeseen.
9. Minimizing Business Workloads. In the office world there's always way more work than there is time to do it. You need to be able to figure out what not to do, and how to not do it, by organizing and prioritizing, and still impress your boss with your thoroughness.
10. Job Hunting Basics. People need realistic expectations about how much effort and time it takes to get just about any job. Atrocious resumes and social network antics will kill your career. The difference between job descriptions and accomplishments seems to elude most people.

The real problem for many of these, I suspect, is finding qualified instructors to teach. Until then, the best alternative I can recommend is to sign up for job internships at every opportunity, while still in school. You might find on-the-job experiences more valuable than all your other courses, or you might change your major.

Amazingly, it seems that people in business are more highly educated these days, but less prepared than ever before. What's another course that you wish you had taken in school, but didn't realize was missing until too late? There's another generation right behind us that needs to know.

Marty Zwilling is CEO & Founder of Startup Professionals Inc.

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