• you continued to empower your team;
• you focused on getting just a few things accomplished
• you even had a major success performing a new procedure that your office has not previously offered, and
• you met your daily production goals except for one day.

Yet at the end of the week you go home feeling tired, alone, and frustrated?

Was it simply that a staff member failed to do something that you’ve repeatedly asked her to do or that another came to work almost an hour later than normal (but in time for the morning huddle)?

Why did all the good things that happened in your practice this past week get overshadowed by a few things that were less than perfect?

THE PROBLEM:  You are frustrated because you want your staff to do EVERYTHING AT ONCE that you think should be done and it must be done your way.  You are not satisfied when only the agreed-to highest priorities are done.  You have such high standards for yourself and for your practice that anything less than 100% perfection in all areas simultaneously strikes you as “not good enough.”  What I’ve observed is that perfectionist managers are chronically unhappy with their staff and with their own personal performance.

THE SOLUTION:  Excellent leaders learn to focus on a few priority items at a time and help the staff perfect those first few.  Outstanding CEO’s “prioritize their issues” and are satisfied with incremental mastery of a few essential items before moving on to the next issues. This approach is called “continuous improvement.”

And excellent leaders empower their staff by “letting go.”  Effective leaders hire the right people, train them, and allow them to do their job. If you insist on controlling “every little thing” then you have not given up control of the jobs that your staff performs.  It is no wonder you feel overworked.  You are doing your job and you are doing their jobs too, if not physically, at least mentally when you feel like you must remind, scold, coerce, prod, etc.  The paradox is–the tighter you attempt to control everything, the less control you have.  What’s the result?  The staff sees that they’ve disappointed you and everyone feels frustrated and exhausted.  But excellent leaders convey a high level of trust that staff can do an excellent job, without micromanagement.

Focus on these characteristics of outstanding CEOs and you, as a leader, can rejoice in celebrating your “wins” instead of lamenting the less important issues.

<Next, in Part 2, we’ll discuss the Critical 4 Steps that effective leaders follow>

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For example, I exercise by running, doing the elliptical machine or riding my bicycle most every morning for 30 minutes–no compromises, rain or shine. Other goals that I set for myself may or may not get done. Why? There are 4 essential ingredients for goals to have achievable permanence:

1.       I’m convinced that 30 minutes of daily aerobic exercise is the required activity to avoid another triple bypass surgery (My GOAL.)

2.       I’m fanatical about avoiding another triple bypass surgery

3.       Avoiding another triple bypass surgery is a goal of serious and painful consequences.

4.       I’ve done 30 minutes of daily aerobic exercise most every morning for more than 30 days and it has become a habit.

Let’s apply this framework to another goal and see if these 4 principles will assure us of success.

GOAL:   I will have a 30-minute “get-acquainted meeting” with someone in my target market three times a week to determine if my coaching them is a good fit for the two of us.

CONVINCED–I am convinced that having 30-minute sessions with 3 qualified prospects each week will lead to growing my business.

FANATICAL–I am fanatical about helping other people improve their life by building a business, which will provide them with purposeful activity and more cash;

SERIOUS and PAINFUL CONSEQUENCES–this goal of adding clients is the single most important thing I can do in my life to ensure that I achieve my life’s mission of helping others, a major life compass point for me.  One aspect of my self-worth is embedded in this goal.

BECOME A HABIT–After 30 conversations in 10 weeks or less, I will have built a skilled process that ensures that I continue to deliver this essential habit.

Optional:  announce to others your intention, so as to create accountability.  It works for some but I’m ambivalent about relying on others to create one’s accountability, rather than being accountable to oneself.

So you try it.  Do your goals have these 4 critical elements?

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If you are a person looking for a job, you need to have 5-6 low-cost job-finding strategies going on simultaneously.

• Your very first assignment is to find a qualified business coach to ensure that you are a master at expressing your uniqueness in what is called an Elevator Speech or your Unique Selling Proposition (USP.)  Don’t waste networking opportunities by being ill-prepared.
• Develop a social media presence with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and reconnect with colleagues and friends regarding your availability and what you’re looking for–be very specific about what you want and what your uniqueness is.
• Look for free Chamber of Commerce “Ribbon-Cutting” events (often at 5pm) where you can network with business owners while sampling hors d’oeuvres.
• See Toastmasters suggestion below.
• As a temporary measure, start your own part-time business–offering your expertise or your passion for free to the first taker and then start charging
• Go to the public library and sign on to Reference USA to research the industry, the zip code, and the company size information for candidate companies.  Then use social media to find “inside” contacts that can introduce you to their job postings and/or provide introductions to hiring managers.
• Attend user-group meetings of software programs that you are familiar with or have used in the past and network.
• Attend meetings of professional organization (usually evening meetings) with which you would qualify and network.

If you are a business owner in need of more clients, go through a checklist of how many different ways that you use now to find customers.   Business owners should have 10-12 low-cost strategies going on at all times.

• Your very first assignment is to find a qualified business coach to ensure that you are a master at expressing your uniqueness in what is called an Elevator Speech or your Unique Selling Proposition (USP.)  Don’t waste networking opportunities by being ill-prepared.
• Introductions from your existing customers.
• Ask your vendors for other people that may need your services.
• Build strategic alliances with affiliate businesses to share customers.
• If your business is B2B, use Reference USA from your local library as a source of business demographic leads.
• Develop a cold calling campaign.
• Develop a targeted mailing piece.
• Introductions from your list of friends and acquaintances
• Website and SEO (search engine optimization)
• Join BNI networking groups.
• Join a Toastmasters group that meets weekly, to expand your circle of influence and develop speaking and leadership skills AND to have fun! (or Kiwanis, Elks, etc.).
• Join the chamber of commerce and have a booth at their business faire.
• Find someone who is schooled and certified in guerrilla marketing tactics–low cost, innovative, high-energy.
• Assemble a business council group of your target market.
• Brainstorm with your employees.
• Offer referral bonuses to others to bring you customers.
• Advertise on the radio.
• Find clients or customers for your friends or business associates and they will reciprocate if you are specific about your ideal client.

If you have questions about any of these suggestions, drop me a line or give me a call.  I’m sure that time spent to master some of these skills will prove beneficial for the rest of your life.  And many of them will be fun experiences as well.  Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Faced with Job or Business Loss?

When you are face-to-face with a loss of income, your initial response is often one of immediate panic and fear.  “How will I survive financially?”  The thought is terrifying of not having money for food, for college tuition for your kids, for doing the things that cost money.  This predicament even evokes the fear that you’ll lose your car and your house.  Nothing can be more debilitating than facing the prospect of becoming a homeless person.  Even more terrifying is the shame that you project for yourself and your family as to how this new situation will reflect on you in the eyes of your friends and neighbors.  Your self-image is shattered at the prospect of not finding another job, not having enough retirement funds, or not finding new customers for your business.  So what can you do to break this endless cycle of not sleeping at night?  And nighttime, when it’s dark, seems to make things even more terrifying than in the daytime.  At least it was for me.

Your response centers on how you view your situation. Or more importantly, your solution centers on how you view your situation. You can make all this pain disappear. You can make life return to its previous glory or even make it more wonderful. It may not be precisely the same, but who cares if it’s better than it was before? At least it was for me.

When you reclaim your income or revive your business, there will be laughing and joyfulness and happiness and smiles all around. An enormous weight will have been lifted from your shoulders. You will walk around the neighborhood or your grandkids’ soccer games with your head high and a smile on your face. You will become the playful, engaging person that you were before. You will schedule vacations and buy birthday presents again; your credit card balances will shrink. And so on. At least it was for me.

So what can you do to turn your situation around?  The action you must take is to acknowledge that it will be an easier journey if you have the support and guidance of someone else who previously has conquered this monster that’s now confronting you.   Read pages 106 and 107 of The Secrets of a Millionaire Mind.  Then call me and arrange for us to have a 60-minute no-obligation dialogue about your situation.  Or just call me first; I have an extra copy of this New York Times’ best-selling book for you.  With the insight in this book and a mentor beside you, your journey will be amazing!  At least it was for me.

How do I know this will work for you?  I don’t.  But here’s what one lady said:
In the four months you’ve been my coach, I’ve gone from zero offices, zero clients, and zero marketing strategies to two offices, 12+ ongoing full-fee clients, several evaluations and brief therapy clients, and a strong and generative marketing presence. Calls are coming in regularly. Thank you Marty!

Call me and we’ll find out how I can serve you.  (520)318-5596 or marty@bizpainpoint.com

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Now there’s a prescription for a unique positioning of my coaching business!  Wouldn’t that be wonderful to be paid for results of the people I coach?  This concept will revolutionize coaching.  Most people are reluctant to pay money when they have nothing to show for it.  And that’s a wonderful guarantee.

Let’s look at numbers of a real-life example:  Say I start coaching someone who has zero income in month #1  and I charge her nothing.  Then after 4 months she has a gross income of $1,500 per week and a business expense bill of $1,500 per month.  Her net income is $4,500 per month.   She should be able to afford to pay me $500 per month.   That would be 11% of her net or 8% of her gross.  For me to earn $1,295/month (my going rate) I would need to help her net $11,800, sustained for 3 months.

Thus  the compensation plan would state that if you have no business I will be paid nothing  at the outset.  Then I’m to be paid 10% of the incremental (since I started coaching her) net earnings averaged over 3 months.   The assumption is that we have a QB P&L, B/S, and C/F statement in effect after the gross income reaches $2,500 per month.

Now a naysayer might say that what if the business owner never did her homework and had no financial results?  I’d say I need to “fire” her and move on to clients who want to do the work and get the results.  After all, what’s a better way to ensure that I’m always working with “raving fans?”   And what if they fire me after they start earning the really big money?  I’m always only 3 months behind their earnings so it’s not like my pay-for-performance has major lag-time built into it.

Bottom-line, I’d say this concept of pay-for-performance has the potential to be a very powerful “Irresistible Offer.”  Thanks, Harv.

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As a youngster, I had no problem having my own businesses:   I had a paper route when I was in the 4&5th grades until we moved out of the country and when I moved back to the United States for high school I started another paper route for two years;  I was a baby-sitter for many years;  I mowed lawns for neighbors every summer;  and while in college I umpired men’s softball games.  This was standard, traditional adolescent  entrepreneurship.  But when it came time for me to choose a profession for life’s work, it never occurred to me that I could earn a living with my own business.   Why was that?

Why did I not feel that I could earn a living based on my wits?  I suppose it was because I was too much in my head rather than in my heart.  And more simply I really did not have a role model for free-lancing one’s financial fortunes.  I knew no one that had started multiple business or even one.

Everyone I knew worked for “the man,” a company or the government.  My Dad was career Air Force, my uncles all worked for the Service or for large corporations. Our neighbors, everywhere we had lived, were Air Force neighbors, so they weren’t role models for striking out on one’s own.   And because the AF sent us to a new base every three years I never developed any really close relationships to my “townie” (who weren’t in the AF) friends’ parents .  In high school most of those parents were farmers, not exactly role models for me.

So in my earliest years, having my own business was simply not a conscious thought.  In hindsight, that was very unfortunate.

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“How?” By helping baby boomers and biz owners solve problems.

“Tell me more…”

Baby boomers are frequently faced with the prospect of losing their job and either not having enough money or not having anything meaningful to do with their life. I help them understand that the power to earn more money or the ability to find something to do every day that really strikes a passionate chord lies within them.  And I help them understand that I can guide them, as I have guided others:

1. to identify their true calling,
2. to develop a plan that will earn them money, and
3. to coach them each week to execute that plan.

Likewise business owners often get stuck:

• with how to move their business to the next level, or
• with how to create better balance between their business and their personal life, or
• with how to find employees that don’t have to be corrected or motivated every day, or
• with how to have more cash at the end of the month.

With my 35 successful years in business and with my access to over 100 other collaborative business coaches across the country, I help business owners solve their problems and to have fun doing it.

In the process of baby boomers and business owners becoming more successful, enterprises are created and expanded and more jobs are created. Not only are new jobs created but I find that the existing jobs are restructured in such a way that the offices for the existing job-holders becomes a more enjoyable place to work.  Businesses cannot thrive without the employees being energized to come to work rather than dreading another day at the office.   Everyone wins in countless ways when businesses succeed!

So that’s what I do. And is it work? No, I do not consider that doing whatever one wants to do and doing it whenever one wants to, to be called “work.”

And what do you do? Do you dread doing what you do? Has it lost its freshness?  Life is too short to be miserable.  You do not necessarily have to abandon what you’re doing now.  It may require nothing more than a different point of view to turn things around. I can give you that new point of view-guaranteed!

Related posts:

1. Faced with Job or Business Loss?
2. An Irresistible Offer

Nothing Fails Like Success

Are you struggling to make changes or respond to changing conditions? I know many people right now are being forced to change the way they work or live because of our turbulent environment. What we might all consider in these times is what the great historian Arnold Toynbee once said:

Nothing fails like success.

What does that mean exactly? Well, if you consider the challenges you’re facing, you might just be using an old approach that isn’t equal to the challenge. In other words, when we have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that’s called success. But once we have a new challenge, the old, once successful response no longer works. That’s why it’s called a failure.

We have to examine our paradigms (our view of things), our tools, our skills to determine if we’re approaching the problem in the right way. As a first step, we may even step back and make sure we’ve correctly defined the problem. Then we need to see if, based on the evidence of results or lack of results, if we need a new approach.

As you ponder your challenges, consider if you need a new mindset, a new skillset or toolset. You may need to adjust your view, try a different perspective or a new way to think about it. Then you may need to acquire some new skills or tools to tackle the problem. What ever the case, you may need to find a new model to drive success. This can be an exciting proposition because you will most likely find new growth and development in the process-this is success!

Remember: nothing fails like success. Be vigilant and be ready to continually learn and adapt to new challenges, which will surely come your way.

Source: StevenCovey.com.

These words seem to me to be applicable in a whole host of situations, not only for myself but also as prescriptive advice to those folks whom I coach but may not be feeling the success that they desire.

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With Shyla’s help I conclude (in my overly-simplistic definition) that living from one’s core means to align your passion WHILE at the same time focusing your energies on those people that most directly are impacted by one’s own personal story, i.e.,  CORE=PASSION+STORY or “Living from your CORE=alignment of your Passion and your Story.”

My story, as many of you may know, centers around my fear of 40 years:   how am I going to continue to live the life that a 6-figure corporate income brought me?   Within a week of being introduced to a mentor/coach I was able to overcome that fear and the rest is history:   I’ve been living from my heart and my passion ever since.

So how did I overcome that 40-year fear in a just a week’s time?  To keep it simple:  I changed the way that I thought about the problem.  The problem did not change.  The situation in which I found myself did not change.  I did not suddenly have solutions to the fears that had accompanied me for all my adult life.  I simply changed the way that I thought about the problem.   I switched my perspective from needing to have all the answers to one of confidence that I would be able to deal with whatever issues came up.  And where did this new-found confidence come from?  That’s a discussion for another day.

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