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Archive for the ‘business challenge’ Category

One of the biggest things that most often holds us back from achieving our full potential is permission to succeed, or the feeling that we’re somehow not fully qualified to offer our advice and expertise to others. Have you ever felt that way?

Whether you’re thinking of starting a high-end coaching program, marketing a new product or putting together a conference, the most valuable thing you can do for yourself is to give yourself permission to succeed. The people who achieve the most in life aren’t stronger than you, or smarter than you; they succeed because they give themselves permission to try.

Self-Doubt is Common, and Deadly To Your Success
Self-doubt isn’t an unusual problem to face when we begin new projects, or undertake new endeavors. When we try something for the first time, there’s always the question of failure. Sometimes people even wonder if they have a right to try what they’re trying, as though only other people can undertake massive projects.

One of the best things you can do for yourself is give yourself permission to try the big things you want to try. Most people know a lot more than they think they know, and have a great position from which to strike forth and begin a new endeavor.

For example, if you’ve been in your business for ten years and have built your business from the ground up, you’re absolutely qualified to talk to people about how to build a business like yours, or how to operate in your niche. The accumulated experience of those years is your qualification. You don’t have to be a coach or a guru to offer something valuable; in many cases, your personal experience is the most valuable thing you can share.

Successful People are Ordinary People Too
It’s important to understand that successful people aren’t magical, or special in some way that you’re not. Successful people are ordinary people, too. Successful people typically have talent and know-how, but the key factor that sets them apart is a willingness to actually do the things they do; not a unique qualification or special asset that other people don’t possess.

For me, joining Yanik Silver’s mastermind group was extremely valuable, because it quickly became clear that Yanik, one of the most successful people in his field, is just an ordinary person. He’s got a lot of talent and know-how, but he’s still a flesh-and-blood human like the rest of us. Getting to know Yanik was the key to realizing that an ordinary person can do wildly successful things, such as starting a high-end coaching program or organizing huge events.

Don’t make excuses to avoid starting your new projects. Don’t wait until tomorrow, or next week; don’t wait until you’ve taken that class or landed that big client.

These are all excuses that self-doubt uses to prevent you from succeeding. Do yourself the biggest favor of all: give yourself permission to try the important things. It doesn’t matter if you’re just an ‘ordinary person.’ We’re all ordinary people. It’s time for you to really start creating your own success!

How much money do you want to make this year?

If you’ve answered this question with a round number, like, $100,000, or $1,000,000, or an, “I don’t know,” you don’t have a goal, you have a wish.  It’s imperative that you know your goal income numbers, specifically.  You must know how much you have to net today, this week, and this month in order to land the yearly salary that will support the lifestyle that you desire.

Here are some get-specific Millionaire Mindset methods:

• What would you like to do in the next year? Move?  Take your dream vacation?  Send a child to college?  Hire someone to manage all of that stuff for you?  Or make it possible for your spouse to leave his or her job to come to work for you?

Don’t forget the smaller costs that go along with each large goal, like the cost of providing your newest employee with a company car and fringe benefits, travel costs, tuition, and your existing lifestyle costs.  Don’t estimate.  Make phone calls.  Get current pricing on airfare, college tuition, health care, or whatever bills you’ll have to foot.  Write it down…you’re going to need it.

• Now that you’ve done the addition, do the division. Break out the calculator and find out how much you’ll need to net in a month, a week, and a day.  This will give you a manageable and reachable goal path.

Lots of people say they want to be millionaires.  But if you ask them how much they need to make this afternoon to stay on track for that wish, you’ll likely be met with a dumbfounded look.  Once this step is completed, you will be distinctly separate from those with a wishing frame of mind.

• Challenge yourself in the pursuit of your income goal. If that means working an extra 30 minutes to meet your daily income goal, do it.  If that means negotiating on a deal, even if you’re not comfortable with negotiation, then do it.

When you know how much money you need to earn this week, in pursuit of the big goal, you’ll be encouraged to do the things that aren’t so desirable.  Every time you challenge the boundaries of your comfort zone, those boundaries will soften, and your comfort zone will grow.

A goal like, “I want to make a million bucks this year,” will never incite you to rewrite an email or to hold firm on your retail price for an item.  But if your goal is, “I need to clear another $50 today to stay on track,” you’ll push right through, because you will connect those little tasks with your big goals for yourself, your family, and your lifestyle.

• Successful business people always know their numbers. They rifle off their conversion rates, costs, costs of sale, and precise percentage profits.  Businesspeople who don’t know are probably losing money.

• If the thought of calculating, relating to, or speaking about numbers frightens you, then hire a business manager to do it for you.  Investing all of your energy in working in your business, without working on your business, will be detrimental to your income goal.

• The numbers might be simple now, but if your goal is to make a million dollars, or any other impressive number, you’ll have to expect the money flow, in both directions, to become more complicated.  Adopt a know-your-numbers attitude now, rather than jumping into a sea of number soup when your chances of drowning are high.

In short, know how much money you need to make.  Then know how much money you need to make this week in order to reach that goal.  Name it, and then claim it!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

By declaring your goal, whatever it may be, you are taking the first step toward achieving it. Taking that first step is a good start. But, the very instant you make the decision and take the step, something is going to come up – a challenge that you will likely need to face. It could be a fear, an obstacle, or an external challenge or circumstance you didn’t foresee.

When fears, obstacles and circumstances arise, it’s easy to go into panic mode and contract and retreat. If you do this, you will end up feeling like you’ve tried and failed.  And when you feel like that, you’re actually worse off than when you started. In addition to not achieving the goal that you wanted, you’re also left feeling bad about yourself.

Here’s something truly valuable you need to learn about change. It’s so important to grow bigger than your obstacles or unwanted circumstances.

This is what people who are consistently successful do. They take the step. They still experience the obstacle, fear or external circumstance that comes up. But, instead of shrinking, successful people make a decision. They choose to grow bigger than their problems. They expand – and the solution becomes visible.

Richard Branson, a hugely successful businessman who is admired by many, went through this scenario early in his career. He found a loophole where he didn’t have to pay taxes on the store he owned – or so he thought.

He ended being fined an enormous sum of money, with his only options being to pay his fine or go to prison. Branson made what appeared to be a crazy decision. His solution was to open another store to make more revenue to pay his fines.

In that instant, he chose to grow bigger than his problem.

That is partly what makes him such a successful businessman, and such a tremendous contributor to society on a global scale.

To make an impact like that, you have to learn to be comfortable with managing your fears and challenges. When you encounter an obstacle, grow bigger than the problem.  When you learn to do this, nothing is out of your reach.

When obstacles and challenges and fear come into play, you need to find new ways to handle them. Ask yourself, “What do I need to learn?  What do I need to do differently in order to fully step into my new life?”

The instant you do, the solutions will become visible. They may well have been there all along, but you couldn’t see them before. As you grow bigger than your problems, new opportunities will appear because you are doing things differently.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Picture this image of two boys playing in a garden, trying to catch some birds.

One of the boys rushes around frantically with a net trying to catch the birds. Every time he gets close, the birds fly away. There’s lots of squawking, and feathers flying. The other boy stands quietly, holding out some birdseed.

One boy is trying very hard, and is probably exhausted, while the other hardly seems to be working at all.

Which one will get the results he’s looking for?

Instinctively you know it’s the boy with the birdseed who will be more effective, and a lot less sweaty.

When it comes to marketing and trying to attract clients, you want to act more like that second boy. Unfortunately, though, most people tend to act more like the first.

A lot of the things you might be doing, that are considered to be traditional marketing techniques, might actually be counterproductive. You could well be chasing people away.

Effective marketing techniques used on the wrong market will only provoke resistance, and build defensiveness. You could be running after people, figuratively speaking, with barrages of email, rounds of cold calls and direct mailings, and quite possibly be achieving the exact opposite of what you want.

For example, no matter how effective cold-calling may be for me or someone else, if you detest doing it, your negativity will prevent it from being effective for you.

Even if you are using marketing techniques that are proven to attract clients, if you do them with the negative energy of chasing – if you give off the sense that you are giving simply in order to get – you will end up like the boy who is chasing the birds. Tired and without any bird in the hand.

You want to break down the barriers between you and your prospective clients, not create more of them.

Make sure that the things you are doing marketing-wise, both online and offline, will attract clients to your business. Doing what everyone says is the right thing, but doing it with the wrong energy, won’t produce results.  Do the things that feel right to you. That will bring the positive energy into your marketing, and your clients will feel it.

You’ll know when you’re being a client magnet because it will feel easy. It should feel enjoyable, and you will have an abundance of clients.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

You see an advertisement for a high-priced training course that you know would fill in a lot of business blanks for you.  You know that this course covers exactly what you need to know to move your business to the next level.  Will you decide to sign up for the course or will you pass by?  How do you decide if you will attend or not?  Will your decision be based on your current income or the income you can realize once you have that training under your belt?

More important than the answer to this question is the thinking that you used to arrive at your answers.  Did you think, “My current income won’t support a payment like that.  I’m going to have to pass”?  If you did, you’re making decisions based on your current circumstances, and if you continue to limit yourself that way, you’ll severely cripple your ability to grow to the great potential that is within you.

In order to grow and reach our true potential, you must change your current mindset. Any time a threshold is to be crossed (in this case, a monetary one), a change in thinking must occur.  If you can manage to set yourself on the right course, some of those changes will happen naturally, while others will have to be consciously changed in order to get results.

One of those changes is in the way that you make decisions.

Another working example might be an investment in your business.  What if you meet a dynamic systems expert, whom you know would be able to streamline your business operations so that you can concentrate on making the money that you’ll need to promote the lifestyle you desire?  But, what if the fee for that expert is $25,000 – money that you don’t have lying around, just waiting to be spent?

Here’s the question you might ask:  “Will I invest the money, or not?”  But here’s the real decision:  Will you view the $25,000 through the lens of your current situation, or through the lens of your ideal destination?  Even though you would rather not spend the money now, how will it compare to the $1,000,000 you’d like to make this year?

That puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?

Those who continue, time after time, to make decisions based on their current circumstances are often saying “No” to themselves.
In order to make decisions based on your destination, you need to venture outside of the boundaries of your comfort zone. As difficult as this can seem, no progress can be made without doing so.  If you make an investment that you might be uncomfortable with, based on the future, as opposed to the present, you will work harder to make sure that the investment will work for your business.  In other words, that step outside of your comfort zone moves you along the path to your goal more quickly.

Your current circumstance is the direct result of decisions that you’ve made.  If you’re not in your ideal situation, that simply means that you have made some poor decisions; but that doesn’t mean that you can’t change your thinking and look to the future – starting right now.

So what will it be?  Current situation or ideal destination?

Let’s say that you set a goal to quit smoking, or to lose 20 pounds or to make a million dollars. What is your very next step?

In any of those instances, the first step is basically the same. You need to make a decision. Whatever goal you want to achieve is the direct result of the decisions you make to achieve it. Everything you’ve experienced, in your career, your personal life, in your financial status, is a result of the decisions you’ve made.

And, if you don’t like the results, then you need to change the decisions.

In fact, I encourage you to take that even one step further. Don’t just change the decisions, change your decision-making process. The decisions you make are a result of your decision-making process, and you just might have a faulty process.

Only you know for sure if your decision-making process is flawed. How is your year going?   Are you living the glory days or just a mediocre existence?  Are you achieving outrageous success or is your business just full of challenges? You know because you’re living it.

Learn the three key questions you should ask that will help you to improve, not simply the decisions that you make, but the way in which you make them.

1.    “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” Consider the worst-case scenario when you make a decision. Asking yourself this will help you learn how to take risks in your business. It will toughen you against the possibility of any little thing going wrong, and will give you the confidence to move forward in spite of that possibility.

The thought of losing money holds a lot of people back from taking risks or making changes. But if you consider the worst that could happen, it’s impossible to lose money. If something doesn’t turn out the way you anticipated, you may not have received the expected return on your investment, but you didn’t lose. You learned. Consider it an education expense.

2.    ”What will it cost me if I don’t do (or buy) this?” If you ask yourself, “What will it cost me to do this (or buy this)?” instead, you are allowing the cost of something to be the prime motivator in your decision-making.

How much money you have or don’t have should not govern the decisions you make in your business. The key is that when you’re not afraid of losing money, you make different decisions about money and it no longer governs your business decisions.

3.    “What do I need to get an instant return on this investment?” When you invest in something, like a product or a mentor or even a virtual assistant, you want to know how to ensure that you see that investment back quickly. In the end, what you need is for that investment to not actually cost you money but end up making you money.

Notice that not one of the questions asks, “What’s the cheapest way to do this?” That’s not how I want you to think. That’s not how you should make decisions.

Apply these questions to an investment you’ve been considering – something that you’ve been thinking about doing in your business, something that you’ve been wanting to do and that you know would help you grow your business. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you can’t afford to do it.

Approach that investment with these three questions and you’ll see what happens. These questions will lead to different solutions for you. These are some of the very questions that I include in my own decision making, and I know that they will open up some new possibilities for you.