Making a Meaningful Mentoring Agreement

Successful mentoring relationships start with a clear agreement about goals, procedures, and limitations, says mentoring expert Lois Zachary.

Too often mentors and mentees start off without doing enough preparation and end up with an unsatisfactory experience. Zachary, author of The Mentor's Guide and the recently published The Mentee's Guide to Mentoring, provides guidelines for setting the groundwork for great mentoring.

Preparing for a mentoring relationship

Zachary suggests seven steps in an initial conversation between potential mentor and mentee.

1. Take time to get to know each other. To start out, share career journeys.

2. Talk about mentoring. Talk about individuals who have had a profound impact on your development and learning. Discuss previous mentoring experiences.

3. Share your goals for the process. What does each participant hope to achieve from the relationship?

4. Determine what each partner needs and expects. Be honest about what you need, says Zachary. A brain to pick? Someone who can help you get your arms around a problem? Someone to give you a kick in the pants?

5. Candidly share personal assumptions. As an example of mismatched assumptions, Zachary offers the following example: The mentee assumes that his or her mentor will be a sounding board, help with day-to-day challenges, provide quick answers to questions, and introduce him or her to his or her network. Meanwhile, the mentor assumes that his or her role is to be a guide, asking questions that help the mentee find answers. Unless the two talk their assumptions through, they will be at cross purposes.

6. Share limitations. Each of us has limitations, whether personal, time related, work related, or physical, says Zachary. It's best to share them early on.

7. Discuss personal styles. For example, you may have data from Myers Briggs or other instruments that indicate your need for structure or your resistance to "touchy-feely."

Create a Specific Agreement

After an initial discussion, you are ready to prepare a formal agreement, Zachary says. Here are her required ingredients for such agreements:

• Well-defined goals (What does each participant want to accomplish?)
  
  
• Success criteria and measurement (How will we know if we have succeeded?)
  
  
• Accountability assurances (How do we ensure that we do what we say we are going to do?)
  
  
• Ground rules (What are the norms and guidelines we will follow? Who will be responsible for what?)
  
  
• Confidentiality safeguards (What do we need to do to protect the confidentiality of this relationship?)
  
  
• Boundaries and hot buttons (What are the not-to-exceed limits? What hot buttons exist?)
  
  
• Protocols for addressing stumbling blocks (What process should we have in place to deal with any stumbling blocks we encounter?)
  
  
• Consensual mentoring agreement (What do we need to include to ensure that this agreement works for us?)
  
  
• Mentoring work plan (What are the steps for achieving our goals?)

Mentoring and training are both important parts of the daily HR challenge. They can be tricky to manage—there's such a load of extraneous planning, preparing, and tracking involved.

The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual

This free PDF book is for PHP programmers developing applications for Oracle Database. It bridges the gap between the many PHP and Oracle books available and shows how to use the PHP scripting language with Oracle Database. You may be starting out with PHP for your Oracle Database. You may be a PHP programmer wanting to learn Oracle. You may be unsure how to install PHP or Oracle. Or you may just want to know the latest best practices. This book gives you the fundamental building blocks needed to create high-performance PHP Oracle Web applications.

About the Authors

Christopher Jones works for Oracle on dynamic scripting languages with a strong focus on PHP. He is a lead maintainer of PHP's open source OCI8 extension and works closely with the PHP community. He also helps ensure that future versions of Oracle Database are compatible with PHP. He is the author of various technical articles on PHP and Oracle technology, and has presented at conferences including PHP|Tek, the International PHP Conference, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and ZendCon. He also helps present Oracle PHP tutorials and PHPFests worldwide.

Alison Holloway is a senior product manager at Oracle with a number of years experience in advanced technology. She has presented at various PHP conferences. Most recently she has been working with Oracle VM.

Click Here to download this PDF book (6.2MB)

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An Inside Look at Men's Secret (and Not So Secret) Fears

Found this interesting article on the internet about the fears, obsessions and anxieties of men.

Men have just as many fears, obsessions, and anxieties plaguing their psyches as women do. Here, a few bold men reveal what men fear most about Sex, Relationships, and Fatherhood.

What Men Fear Most About Sex, Relationships, and Fatherhood - Redbook:

The Manual: Book Review

A True Bad Boy Explains How Men Think, Date, and Mate--and What Women Can Do to Come Out on Top

Written by Steve Santagati

Do men notice your haircut? Your heels? Your witty sense of humor?

Let's face it: women want to look sexy sometimes. And whether you're into a vintage style, or the full-on va-va-voom, you do wonder, what do guys notice? If you ever wanted to know about men's preferences—like whether your Manolos even register on his Richter scale—here's your definitive guide. In this excerpt from The Manual, you'll find out for sure what men find sexy.

Attention to vanity will seem shallow at times, but in the game of love, it's very important. Most women I see are lazy in this department. And, not surprisingly, these are the same women who complain, saying things such as “Men are so superficial,” “I want him to love me for what's inside,” or “I hate the gym.” Well, no one is telling you that you can't dress as you choose. But when you put those constraints on yourself, you're limiting the number of men who will find you attractive. In the end, meeting the right person is a numbers game, and part of getting those numbers rolling is how you dress.

Lingerie

Lingerie can be inexpensive, but it can't be the kind that comes in a package of three (white, pink, and blue). Nor can it be the “granny” kind with a waist that reaches up to you rib cage and that hangs like a diaper. Lingerie is one garment that you should find as sexy as he does. And it benefits you, too. Women have told me that when they wear nice underwear, even though no one may see it, they will actually walk and talk differently, just knowing they have a little sexy secret. If lingerie can do that to a woman—and we already know how it affects men—then don't you think you should go out and get yourself some? You have tons of choices, and when it comes to lingerie, men like just about anything.

Shoes

Again, men don't care. We know you like them. We don't understand why you like them. All we know is that many of you have closets full of them, and we've figured out that since you spend so much time and money on them, we can compliment them to flatter you. That's about it.

Most likely, if a guy tells you what nice shoes you have, he's either gay or “working on you.” My friend Mari recently told me that a guy came up to her in the airport and complimented her on new shoes. She's so sweet that she thought he meant it. I'm not saying that they're not nice shoes. But have you ever heard a man say, “Well, the thing that caught my eye was Shirley's shoes. I love those pumps, and when I saw them I knew she was the woman for me”? I don't know a single male who would say, “Dude, this chick had the hottest shoes on last night. Damn, I should've gotten her number.” It doesn't happen. Shoe flattery is for one purpose one: flattery.

Have I made my point?

There is one style of shoes that men notice, and that's high heels. But heels are more about what a girl looks like in them than about the shoes themselves. Heels make feet and legs look sexy. The classic example is a girl wearing high heels in a bikini. Cheesy, and not particularly functional in the sands of Miami and L.A., but men notice for sure.

Hair

Hair, on the other hand, is, sigh, one of the sexiest things about a woman. Hair grabs us and doesn't let us go. Think octopus tentacles. Your style, color and texture are no matter. Your hair only needs to have a clean, tousled, just-out-of-bed look. My opinion is that most women look sexier with longer hair than shorter. Men like long, sexy hair largely because we don't have it. Plus, very few women can get away with that short boyish look. Next time you're out in public, watch how men look at women with long hair versus short.

On a related note, hair salons suck. I can't believe what they've done to some of your mops. They're not just ruining your hair; they're wrecking your love life. With the Internet and a gazillion fashion magazines at your fingertips, you've got plenty of references. Please think sexy and spend the time and money to get the right do. When in doubt, turn to whichever celebrity women are getting the most attention for being sexy, and copy them. Messy sexy is what you should be after: think Sheryl Crow, Jessica Alba, Jane Seymour and Reese Witherspoon.

A few more tips: Don't color your hair based on the swatches you picked up at the paint store. Other styles to avoid include bad bangs, mullets and that “business in the front/party in the back” look. And stop cutting your hair short as you age—there's no need to.

Dresses

Every woman wears a dress differently. The only hard-and-fast rule is to pick a dress that accentuates your best body parts. Whether you have a gorgeous back, incredible thighs, or lovely collarbones, stock up on designs that not only fit but also highlight those attributes.

Your shape and height determine much of what you'll look good in, but here are some general rules of thumb:

Shorter Girls

• Wear heels. Heels create the illusion of longer legs. And as I've said, they're sexy!
  
  
• Buy a dress that vaguely clings, while still allowing your bum to move freely. Check out the red carpet “best dressed” lists for examples.
  
  
• Loose cotton dresses are best if you have some pounds to shed. They give us a hint of your bum and legs without a solid picture. We have vivid imaginations and we fantasize you better-looking, not worse. (We're on your side here. Just give us something to work with!)

Taller Girls

• Stand up straight, shoulders back, chest high.
  
  
• Wear longer dresses that hug your legs a bit. You want a fitted design.
  
  
• Pick either heels of flats, depending on how tall you want to appear.
  
  
• Make sure that at least 60 percent of your skin is covered by the dress. You have a lot of skin, and a little goes a long way.
  
  
• As with shorter girls, loose-fitting, sheer cotton dresses that cling a little are great for those of you carrying a bit of extra weight.

Tops and Bottoms

This is fairly straightforward: You need to have tops and bottoms in your closet that you have no doubt are “man killers.” Call it your “good luck resisting me” section. This is the part of the closet that houses the cleavage cuts, the tighty tops, and the bootylicious jeans. Feel free to mix and match from the more “domestic” side of your closet, but never forget: it's a jungle out there, and sometimes it pays to get a little wild if you want to survive.

Glasses

Glasses are hot! Hands down. Just make sure you pick a great style that flatters your face and keep the lenses free of eyelashes and finger prints. I love chicks in glasses.

A self-confessed serial dater and Bad Boy, Steve is telling all for the benefit of womankind. Every guy is at least part Bad Boy, and in The Manual, this prime specimen reveals what every woman needs to know to counter Bad Boy tactics, both amateur and professional. Steve is never condescending or callous, but honest, perceptive, and street-smart. His guidance is straightforward and his insights are dead-on, giving women tools they can immediately put to work.

Discover what you may not want to know but need to know about:

•The Heart of the Bad Boy (i.e., the nature of the beast)

•The Male Mind: how he sees you and how you can make this work to your advantage

•Guys on the Hunt: the male modus operandi, from the grocery store to Home Depot

•When Boy Meets Girl: how to handle dating, from flirting to “sext” messaging to learning his weaknesses

•Mating: so you’ve got him . . . should you keep him?

Why learn from a Bad Boy instead of, say, a psychologist? Because there’s no replacement for “in the field” experience. You’ll benefit from (and laugh at) stories of real things Steve has done in relationships with women as well as of women turning the tables on him when he least expected it. The book also includes a question-and-answer section, in which Steve explores some of the toughest dating issues. To understand Steve is to understand the Bad Boy, and that will take you a long way in understanding all men. Find out how much more fun dating can be when you get the upper hand on Bad Boys . . . for good.

Buy The Manual Now!

Google forays Into The ebook Biz

Google has indicated its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

The move pits Google against Amazon, which looks to control the e-book market in a very Apple-like way with its Kindle offerings and e-book sale pipeline to them.

Since many ebooks are found from a Google search in the first place there is a binding logic to seeing Google skip the middle man and enter the ebook business themselves.

What’s going to be really interesting I suspect, is to see how well this does against the Amazon Kindle crowd. That ought to be really interesting. Because it will mean Google having to tread onto Amazon’s home turf, I bet that Amazon is not going to take this lying down.

Amazon versus Google

If Amazon have made a false move with the Kindle, who benefits? One beneficiary is surely going to be Apple. The iPhone and the iTouch are already very text capable and they will only get more so as Apple extends the touchscreen interface to larger systems. But the other big gainer, in the long-term, perhaps the biggest beneficiary, is going to be Google. Google with its Book Search program and its alliances with publishers and libraries is going to occupy the place that would otherwise appear to be Amazon's of becoming our preferred source of access to published literature. Amazon seems to have taken a wrong turn in supposing that distribution, rather than access and search, is the key challenge for digital print.

Google and Apple, between them already have the solution for eBooks (and its not a download solution). Read and search on your iPhone and access via a web browser, anything in print can be handled that way. More to the point: everything in print can be handled that way. Everything will be searched via the web, everything will be accessed via the web. Downloads are pretty much of an irrelevance. The question is: what do authors and publishers plan to do about that?

Answer: "Maybe the publishers should themselves try selling/granting access direct". Aside from Google with its Book Search, the publishers are the other variable in the market-place which has a promising opportunity if the Amazon Kindle download system bombs. After all, scientific and technical publishers have made a reasonable fist of creating a digital market for their STM periodicals. Book publishers need to create access opportunities and figure out how to sell digitally direct.

Please leave your comments in the comments box below.

20 Quick Tips for Surviving Change You Didn’t Ask For

1. Focus on the solution, not the problem. Because society rewards analytic thinking, we believe that identifying the cause of our troubles is the answer: Why is this happening? That’s a starting point, but don’t spend too much time there. What are you going to do about where you are?

2. Because feeling in control is so crucial to resilience, and unasked-for-change can leave us feeling very out of control, try asking yourself this question during the day: What am I free to choose right now?

3. What if you don’t believe you have the confidence or talent to find a solution? Pretend you do. Turns out that “fake it till you make it” has validity in brain science—the thoughts you hold and actions you take really do create new pathways in your brain. “As we act, so we become,” as Sharon Begley puts it in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain.

4. Find things to laugh about. People who thrive during change work their funny bones. Says psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Thrivers’ happiness is not dependent on external factors or life circumstances alone. It derives from their chosen state of consciousness and ability to cheer themselves up when things are looking down.” Laughter has been shown to relieve stress, lower blood pressure, and improve breathing as well as mood. Best of all is when we can laugh at ourselves for not being perfect or when we hit some road block in the direction we wanted to go. It helps us stay lighthearted and resourceful.

5. Celebrate success along the way, no matter how small: a new connection, a possible lead, a small savings. Give yourself credit for moving forward in a difficult situation. At the end of the day, look at what you’ve done and celebrate whatever accomplishment you can. Celebration creates positive energy and forward momentum.

6. When considering options, before you say something won’t work, consider how it might work. Try it on for a while.

7. Focus on a positive future. Ricki Lake put it this way: “When I went through challenges in my life…I told myself, `Focus on where you’ll be a year from now.’ It helps to know that, in time, the hard parts will be water under the bridge.” I’d modify that to, focus on where you want to be a year from now (otherwise you can scare yourself with all kinds of terrible futures). Then ask what actions you need to take today to make that positive future happen.

8. Breathe slowly and deeply. Shallow breathing is a sign that you are in fight or flight mode, where you are not in touch with all of your resources to handle this change. A few conscious slow and deep breaths, especially if you also relax your muscles as much as possible, tells the part of your brain responsible for fight or flight that you’re not in danger and so it calms down. Then you’re able to think more clearly, widely, and deeply. To test if you’re breathing deeply, put one hand on your chest, the other on your belly. Take a breath in and out. Are both hands moving? If only the top one is, see if you can get the bottom one going as well.

9. Direct your complaints upward. Sometimes all we can do when faced with a challenging change is to cry out to the heavens, “Help me!” That’s what AA is all about—turning your problem over to a Higher Power, however you understand that to be, so that you aren’t so alone in the difficulty. Writes Carol Orsborn in her book The Art of Resilience, “You don’t have to believe that this works for it to be effective.” Give it a try.

10. Get out and help someone else. As Studs Terkel put it in one of his last interviews, “Once you become active helping others, you feel alive. You don’t feel, ‘it’s my fault.’ You become a different person. And others are changed too.” When we focus on someone else’s problems, we put our own in perspective. Plus we take a break from worrying about ourselves, which is always a good thing. A friend who was in a California fire zone last summer emailed me during the time it wasn’t clear whether she lost her house, saying, “If we focus on helping others, panic diminishes.” Absolutely!

11. Find someone in the same situation to help and pay attention to what you suggest they do. One of your best resources is the advice you give others. Be sure to follow your own suggestions.

12. With apologies to those of us who shun it, thirty minutes of aerobic activity daily is still the best way, experts say, to counteract the stress of change.

13. Encourage yourself along the way as you would a child running a race—“You can do it! You’re doing well!” This positive self talk has been found to increase what psychologists call agency—the belief you can get where you want to go.

14. If you find yourself worrying all the time, set aside a fifteen-minute worry time, say 5 p.m. every day. Then when your mind starts worrying at other times, tell yourself it’s not worry time and distract yourself—read a good book, do a puzzle, something that occupies your mind.

15. If you find yourself having to do things you’d rather not, make sure that you also do things you love on a regular basis: my friend Annette traces her family tree ’cause she loves genealogy, Andy plays the piano, I read novels. Passionate interests give zest to life during change. They don’t have to be expensive.

16. Be sure to thank those who help along the way. Gratefulness is good for your mind, body, and spirit, and it increases the possibility that you will continue to receive assistance.

17. What really matters here? That’s a question that will help you keep the change in proportion. A woman who lost her house was told by her minister that what she needed was a home, not a house. It helped her move to a rental with greater peace and perspective.

18. Hang out with happy people. A large new twenty-year study by Harvard medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis shows that happiness is contagious, spreading from one person to nearby family members, neighbors, and friends. One happy person can increase the happiness of others he or she comes into contact with by 8 to 36 percent, and the effect can last up to a year. Ride on the uplift of others. It will give you the energy to keep on.

19. Quakers are taught to look for “way open” to know if they should pursue something and “way closed” to give up. That means they look for the open door to indicate which way to go and if they encounter too many obstacles, they conclude it wasn’t meant to be. That’s a good strategy for all of us coping with change. Yes, you should be focused on what you want, but if all pathways to a goal are blocked, perhaps that’s a message to give up and pursue something else entirely. As Anthony D’Angelo says, “Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.”

20. Focus on the positive qualities you have to face this change. I recently got my town newsletter and in it, an administrator named Audrey Lee wrote, “The year ahead may be lean in fiscal resources, but I know we are rich in energy, talent, commitment and momentum.” I instantly knew the town was in good hands. The more we pay attention to the resources we have to cope, the better we will do, particularly when we ask ourselves how we can use our energy, talent, commitment, and momentum to succeed.

Excerpted from Adaptability: How to Survive Change You Didn’t Ask For

Why we don’t need to reinvent books for the internet age

ibooks are the very opposite of what publishers need to be thinking about. The very concept of a book as a simple compilation of URLs and bullet points appears quite misleading; perhaps, this model works in tech publishing, where there is a huge demand for “tell me how?” kind of questions. But books that change history rarely answer the “who and where?” type of questions; they are, instead, about the “how and why?” - and this knowledge is hardly searchable, not to mention linkable. Even with such a widely-covered subject as Twitter, there is still a lot to be said about its impact on the information flows, authority, trust, and cognition that may not yet be widely discussed anywhere in the “Twittersphere”. This is why we have traditionally prized original and fresh thinking; what makes it original is precisely the fact that these points haven ‘t yet been addressed before.

This may also explain why sales of serious books haven’t plummeted in the age of free and ubiquitous content. With so many free resource materials available on the Web, it does seem strange that anyone would still want to pay 20 bucks for “a compilation of links” that most non-fiction books are (at least, according to O’Reilly). But the likely explanation here is quite simple: compiling links in meaningful and readable ways is exactly the kind of premium value that we are willing to pay for when we buy a book. It’s becoming obvious that in the age of information abundance the value of curation rises dramatically. As the number of available resources that writers and readers could consult rises, it’s actually quite normal that we would place more and more value on the process of synthesizing rather than simply aggregating information. From this perspective, if I want to read a book on a subject that is slightly more complex than the world of Twitter, I expect that authors would actually read all the available resources (rather than just a sampling of a few hundred 140 “best” Twitter status updates), take a principled stand, and actually try to compress the very boring 30,000 pages they read while researching the book to much more readable 300 pages – precisely “so that I don’t have to”.

Good books – unlike buggy early releases of software – are meant to be finite intellectual products; good books are not supposed to be never-ending and self-updating streams of consciousness. Nor are they supposed to be interrupted by a constant flow of references to other books; if you cannot move to the next page without having to consult a reference work cited in a footnote, the author has probably failed at synthesizing. Granted: everyone is building on someone else’s shoulders. But this is is exactly the point of a talented author: to synthesize by compressing millions of links, facts, and opinions into a readable guide to the subject. The reason why we often turn to the best book in a field that we do not yet know well is exactly to avoid reading twenty books instead. Do not get me wrong: I do have an ereader and I am an avid consumer of ebooks; yes, I do like the ability to navigate from the index page to any page I want. But - and this is a big “but” - I don’t really feel any need to compress the text even further; nor do I feel any need to extend it beyond what it is; most good books I’ve read are good precisely because offer “just enough” information and arguments.