Just going through the motions might end you up headed towards the finish line, but you won’t find yourself competing for the prize.

It takes more than a “reproducible process” to steer your business towards success.

You need hope.

You need to believe that you can make a difference.  That the effort and the agony of the journey is worth the destination.

That’s not fluff or business psycho-babble.  That’s the gritty side of performance that you think you can ignore.  It’s the reason the “7 Step Plan” you are implementing isn’t getting you the results the consultants you hired promised you would see.

Because the plan is only the beginning.  It’s just an idea.  It take more to be successful.

Hope and love and courage and fear — they all work together to make you what you ultimately become.

They are the driving force behind how well your employees execute.  They are the reason why your industry does what it does.

Hope is what drives behavior.

If you don’t have it, you make bad decisions.  You lose meaning and purpose and passion.

Even the best of your plans crumble at the audacity of reality.

What you believe to be possible breathes new life into how you see the world.

Stop looking for a new plan.  Look for a new will to win.

How you feel today will change tomorrow.

You probably won’t change your beliefs and it’s likely that big problems won’t magically disappear overnight, but time brings about a change in perspective.

We say that “getting older makes you wiser”.  Perhaps it is more accurate that getting older makes you less frantic.

Which is important to leverage in business.

One of the big mistakes that business leaders make is not factoring time and perspective into the problems they’re trying to solve right now.

Instead of understanding how fear and pain drive buyer decisions, businesses adopt generic strategies that present a “quick fix” that only serves to accentuate buyer paranoia.

Content is outsourced to marketing team.  E-mail design is artfully prepared by the creative team.  The public relations team put together press releases and speaking notes for television interviews.

But the message is wrong.

A better, more powerful message gets left unsaid.  Instead of a message that “it is what it is” you should deliver a story that “whatever it is can be changed.” 

It puts the buyer back in control of the conversation going on in their head.

There is a simplicity to being in control. It abates helplessness. It stymies hopelessness.

Buyers want to know that despite the external factors crashing down around them that they are in control of their situation.

A sympathetic message of “it can get better” and “we can help you make it better” goes a lot farther then generic, selfish marketing messages aimed at the masses touting the wonderments of your latest and greatest technology.

It’s not about you.

It’s about how you make people feel.

If you can make them feel safe and inspired, they see tomorrow through a perspective that benefits you.

And it’s not just a better buyer pitch, it’s a better way to treat your employees and the people around you.

Create dreams.  Not more frustration.

The basic concept is that you can create content and marketing that together drive sustainable revenue long after the content is first created.  In other words, you spend a lot of time creating something (an e-book, for example) or reselling someone else’s services (like Amway) and over time the business automatically drives large amount of revenue back to you without much ongoing effort.

Which sounds exciting.

Especially if you’re an entrepreneur who is getting older in age or someone interested in pursuing personal hobbies while making enough money to support your lifestyle.  It’s exciting to imagine that you could plug an idea into a proven process, automate your marketing, and then watch as revenue piles in the front door.

The reality is that that strategy doesn’t work. It’s not just a financial scam (where only the top 1.5% actually make any revenue at all), it is an emotional scam.

Let’s be as clear as possible.  It is a bold-face lie that flies in the face of research from thousands of years of what drives successful business.

And yet you want to believe it.

Psychologically you get sucked into the trap of believing that “pre-packaged recurring business” is a viable strategy for long-term success. That you can sit in our home office and create e-books and videos and make enough money to live happily.  That you can recycle someone else’s automated emails and turn it into success.

It just doesn’t work.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. It takes tremendous effort to build a successful business.  Autopilot strategies just aren’t focused enough to drive successful results.
2. Buying behaviors change too often to be manipulated.  A one-size-fits-all marketing system is too vague (and annoying) to capture buyers who actually have money and motivation.
3. Consumers are quick to pick up on manipulation and emotional redundancy.  Since these systems make it easy to copy the exact same e-mails and selling phrases that everyone else is using, buyers notice the lack of real empathy and choose to do business elsewhere.
4. The pursuit of making money is too unrewarding to keep you motivated for too long.  Just making money, as a goal by itself, is not a large enough inspiration to do the hard, gritty tasks that ultimately determines success.
5. To inspire others you must first be inspired.  The idea that you can manufacturer motivation while sitting in a back office churning out content is just not realistic.

The uncomfortable truth is that success isn’t as easy as plugging your name and phone number into an automated “make tons of money” business system.  Making money is not as easy as renting a “platform” that you can use to generate little bits of revenue from people all over the world.

Success demands more.

It demands an unrelenting focus on excellence.  On the greatness inside you.

Running after neuvo-business trends so that you can make money while living an easy life is just heartbreakingly implausible.

You are defrauding yourself the opportunity to realize the goodness you are capable of.  You are cheating yourself the opportunity to make a difference in the world.  You’re choosing fear over power.

Look within yourself .

See the challenger waiting to emerge.

You’re capable of bigger things.

Don’t rob yourself of the delight of truly making a difference.

The easy buck is just a mirage.  It’s you chasing the wrong fantasy.

The reality is that you’re better than that.

Sometimes you wish other people kept their opinion to themselves.

Criticism hurts.

No matter how thick a skin you have, it’s hard not to get worn down by other people’s negative opinions.

You can spend weeks, months, even years being the best at what you do and it all seems to fall apart when that one person misjudges your priorities and mocks your intentions.

It makes you angry. You’re frustrated and confused.  It makes you want to give up.

But that’s what the critics expect from you.  They want you to go away. Which leaves you only one option

To beat the critics at their own game.

Instead of running away, you have to change how you look at criticism.  You have to reframe the negative feedback to your advantage.

Here are a few ideas to help you:

1. State your intentions more clearly (up front) next time.

2. Practice what still feels uncomfortable.

3. Apologize if you’ve offended someone else (even accidentally close).

4. Take notes on what did not get criticized.

5. Resist the urge to defend yourself publicly.

6. Be brutally honest about how much preparation you actually put into the project.

7. Ask for professional help (i.e. pay for a coach or therapist).

8. Write down how you’re going to do it the next time.

9. Spend time each day meditating on your mission.

10. Try it again (and again and again and again).

11. Focus on helping someone else instead of staying mad.

12. Take a breath.  Let off some steam.  Take another breath.

Beating the critics isn’t really about the critics at all.

It’s about you.

It’s about how you feel when things go wrong. It’s about your motivation. It’s about your reason for doing what you do.

It’s all too easy to just do things because people agree with you. That’s easy.

What is hard is to practice and prepare day after day until you get it right.

But that’s also the way you beat your critics.

You beat your self.

You beat back the fear and frustration and your pain and focus on “why” you do what you’re doing.  And an amazing thing begins to happen.

The clarity of your focus and the extra hard work combine to not just build your own confidence but allow you to see the people that you’re actually helping.  And then it doesn’t matter what the experts say.  Because you can see the good that you’re doing all around you.

You can see you’ve beaten the critics.

It’s abrupt. It’s final. It seems like the end of possibilities.

But maybe that’s just because of how we’ve come to understand the word.

Growing up, when you wanted something really badly, the last thing you wanted to hear from your parents was a “no”.  When you applied to your favorite college, the worst answer you could get back was a “no”.  When you interviewed for your first job, it was rather painful to be told “no”. When you had that great executive idea – the perfect strategy for your business, the last answer you wanted to hear from your boss after your pitch was a “no”.

Because “no” means that somehow we haven’t thought through all of the angles.  “No”means that we’re not as smart as we thought we were.  “No” is the end of the dream.

It’s painful to hear.  It’s hard to say.  Because of what “no” means to us.

And so we half-ass our ability to be amazing.

We forget that “no” is the beginning of clarity.  The beginning of focus.

Every time you say “no” you create more clarity. You give yourself a better opportunity somewhere else to succeed.  It might seem easier to dish out a “kinda”, “sorta”,  ”maybe”, “I’ll think about it” type of answer, but you’re only hurting yourself by muddying up the options.

You’re creating new questions for yourself when you already know the answer.  The answer is “no”.

Start thinking about “no” as an opportunity to focus on what really matters to you.  Stop agreeing to things just because you might hurt someone’s feelings or because you feel you might let someone down.

“No” doesn’t mean you can be selfish.  But it does mean you should give yourself all the opportunity in the world to succeed.

Just say “no”.

But that’s just not reality.  And you shouldn’t waste a second believing it.

The hard truth is that success isn’t a series of actions.  It is an attitude.

It’s not about what you do.  It’s about who you are.

You can’t fake it.

You have to feel it.  You have to live it.  You have to be consumed by it.  That’s what makes you successful.

And what is “it” after all?  What is this attitude that you need to have?

It’s obsession.

Plain and simple — you have to be relentlessly focused on “figuring it out”.  You have to be determined to find a solution to the tsunami of problems that come along.

That determination — that grit — is the deciding factor in your eventual success.

That’s it.  That’s all that is important.

There is nothing else that you need to focus on except “staying the course”.

The reality is that you’re not smart enough to figure out ahead of time all the problems that might come your way.  And you won’t be lucky enough to avoid them.  No one is.

You have to power right through them.   Or just give up.

There is no other option.

You can’t avoid future obstacles by thinking about it right now.  That doesn’t work.   All the workshops, webinars, conferences, and books you have consumed are just preventing the inevitable — that you’re doing to get beat up.

You’re going to take an uppercut to the chin and hit the floor.  And it will likely happen when you least suspect it.  When you’re hands aren’t up and your feet aren’t set.

And that’s why what you’ve done doesn’t matter.  Because in that moment you’re finished.  It’s over.  You’re down.  It’s done. Everything else ahead of this is history.

Right now, it’s who you are that matters.  It is what’s inside you that makes the difference.  It’s raw courage and guts that allows you to bend elbows and knees and lift yourself from the bloodied canvas you’re lying on.

There’s no business plan for that.  No process. No workflow.  No contingency.

Just an insane obsession with getting back up and solving the problem that knocked you down.

And the longer you keep getting back up and the faster you clean yourself up, the more you find yourself stumbling towards the finish line you call success.

It takes heart.  Not brains.  Not brawn.  Guts.

Which is why it earns you glory.

These plot lines run through our business speak on a daily basis. It’s in our newspapers, our newsletters, and our news shows.

And it makes for a dramatic plot line. Especially when you put yourself in the role as the small guy that is getting taken advantage of unfairly.

But there’s a danger in building conversations solely focused on anger and discontent.

You run the risk of building a business of angry and malcontent clients. Your snarky, jealous conversation attracted those types of people to your business.

And while the mob used to be angry and upset about someone else, eventually that anger can only stay undirected at you for so long. Angry, spiteful people are always looking for the next target of their vitriol.

Which happens to be you.

You’re stuck in the crosshairs of an outraged, irrational mob. A mob you assembled with your angry conversation.

Which is why anger isn’t the best business model to build your company around. Neither is discontent or frustration.

Try hope.

Try inspiring people to change what frustrates them.  Energize the mob to rise beyond the limits of their fear to achieve the change they want to see in the world around them.

Hope inspires lasting change. It transforms purpose and motivation into personal action and accountability.  Anger and spite just makes for a great soap opera.

You control the conversation you’re having.   No one else is to blame.

Just remember that you get what you go for.  If you think life is unfair. You’ll attract clients who think you’re not fair. If you’re angry so will be your clients.

But you can change that by focusing on the good things around you. They’re there. You just have to start pointing them out.

Instead of creating angry mobs.

“It was an accident” you find yourself saying.  And magically, because you claim that it was an accident, everybody around you is supposed to be okay.

But they’re not.

They are still hurt.  Sometimes badly.

Which always leads to an important question.  Could you have done something about it?  Could you have taken steps to prevent the accident from happening?

The stark conclusion is that there are no accidents.  Just unprepared intentions.

You didn’t intend to hurt someone, but you weren’t planning to prevent them from being hurt.

There’s a big difference between the two.

It is easy to blame a bad economy or softening budgets for why top line growth is stagnant.  We’re careful to list a half-dozen mantras by which we run our businesses. Mantras that discuss customer service ideology, how sales people should conduct themselves, and the overall goals of the business.

But we don’t often plan to avoid creating accidents.  Accidents that end up hurting people and crippling our dreams.

And so, we are always in danger of committing that one final blow that knocks us out of contention for reaching our goals. We’re at the mercy of good motives and intentions without the plan to make sure human nature doesn’t derail us.

It’s a series of small things:

1. Not creating a culture of outrageous service.

Service isn’t a series of “tiers” on an organizational mindmap.  It’s an attitude of delivering value beyond what is being ask for.  It’s an understanding that if the customer makes a mistake on their own that you are responsible for that experience.  It raises the bar from “who is paying for what” to “how can we make sure you leave delighted”.

On it’s own, that”s not how your business works.  You’ll just deliver adequate support and then blame it on “unreasonable customers” when something blows up in your face.  It doesn’t matter who you blame it on, it’s your loss.  Create a culture of mind-blowing moments and reward your best team members based on that scale.

2. Not delivering on the right expectations consistently.

We all have expectations.  In business, a simple expectation is that if you pay for something you walk away from the exchange with a deliverable that is equal (or in greater value) to what you paid for it.  There are other expectations that we often take for granted — like honesty, fairness, respect,  and candor.  When you pressure business development to hit a number instead of delivering on expectations, you tend to generate cyclical frustration.

You’re setting yourself for future failure.  The quota can’t be the goal.  It’s the journey to the goal.  Again, this is best executed at a cultural level.  If you are looking for consistent delight from your clients then you have to shift the focus from money to motivation — from profit to potential.  The brass tacks of business are about you doing the right things long enough for people to trust you to take their money.

3. Not making it easy for customers to engage and disengage.

Make it easy to be fired.  You don’t need 47 page contracts; you need to deliver on results.  That’s the essence of business — delivering on your capabilities to the benefit of the client hiring you.  Newsflash — just because you hide the link to where people can close their account or end their trial doesn’t mean that they are just going to keep using your services.  It just makes them angrier at your incompetence.  Shame on you.

Focus on delivering outrageous service.  Guess what?  No one gets fired for being over-the-top amazing.  Stop. Stop. Stop.  You focusing on the ways you can get screwed over is the wrong mindset.  That’s what loser do.  They connive.  They do business with conniving people.  If you focus on being amazing you don’t have time to deal with those kind of people — and you don’t need 47 page contracts.  You need a handshake .  Start firming up your grip.

Accidents don’t need to happen.

Claiming it was an accident doesn’t clean up the mess. It doesn’t heal broken people. It doesn’t fix a damaging experience.

Any accident is your responsibility. What you “intend to do” and what you “actually do” might be two completely different things.

Stop pointing to a poster on the wall with your values on them.

Look inside yourself and take ownership for the impact you have on those around you.

Stop allowing accidents to happen.

They try a little and you try more.  They win sometimes and you win more.  They’re smart, but you’re clearly smarter.

It’s clear.

You’re better than them.

Which brings up a bigger question: Who are they?

You can always find someone that you’re better than. It’s not that hard.

You might be a better businessman than the homeless person sitting outside your office. You’re probably a better athlete than your child. Chances are, you know more than a fifth grader.  You’re better than them.

And while those are extreme examples, they are a lot like the comparisons that we make to justify how good we are.

Instead of comparing ourselves to the best, we find somebody that we’re better than.  And because we are better than them, that somehow is an excuse for the rest of our inadequacies.

It’s silly de-motivational mind-trash.

It’s the primal, defensive thinking rooted in fear and pain rather than the inspiration of wanting to be better at any cost. It’s a mindset of placating failure rather than demanding more from yourself — even when you’re not sure you’re capable of doing more.

This “better than someone, somewhere” attitude shows up in how we talk about goals and expectations for ourselves.

We find ourselves talking eloquently about “being reasonable” and “being realistic”.  We think we’re being classy and sophisticated.  And we’re dead wrong.

Those are never the attitudes of a champion. Those are never the intentions of a superstar.

Some psychologists would tell us that aiming for too big of goals and failing creates unnecessary disappointment; and that that disappointment is crippling.  But they’re looking at performance from the wrong angle.  A common trait among all high-achievers is their willingness to push themselves in uncomfortable situations where failure is the most likely option.

They do this because they understand a simple concept.

They could compare themselves to others around them and still look better then some.  But the real measure for comparison is not those around them. It’s the person they could be. That’s what superstars compare themselves to.

Being better than they should be.

And it directly results in breakthrough performances. In moments of life changing experience.

They become better than anyone.

Which brings us back to where we started.  You’re already better than them. It’s not even a contest.

But are you better than you?

That’s the real comparison to make.

The “biggest” player in your industry isn’t necessarily the company with the largest advertising budget or the company with the latest technology advancements.

Is something a little more subtle.

The company controlling the conversation.

Think about how you assign credibility — even cavalierly.  Think about the gut instinct that drives how you rate things.

And while there’s a logic to how you prioritize things; when the community as a whole agrees about the same priority, you can assume that the “biggest” player is simply one company winning the emotional debate over what “should be” and “why it should be” so important.

Which is why it’s so important that you understand the conversation that’s going on in your industry.

Instead of trying to build a logical argument about about why that conversation is the wrong conversation, the best approach is to match emotion with emotion.

The company with the best feelings wins.

Instead of hauling out spreadsheets, pie charts, and old industry experts, focus on creating feelings. Focus on creating feelings that shift how your buyers think about your position.

How people feel about something determines how they will build logical arguments to defend those feelings. So create those feelings.  The wrong approach is to lead with logic and expect that that will make people emotional.

Give people emotional choices.

You still won’t convince everyone. You’ll still have the same competitors. Your detractors won’t go away.  None of that will change.

But you will make people feel better about you.

And that’s how you win the politics of business.

You create emotional choices.