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5 Life Changing Books to Start Your Year Off Right

Jan 3, 2023 | Business Growth, Business Owners, Goal Setting, Leadership, Motivation, Productivity, Strategic Planning, Success, Uncategorized

5 Books to Launch Your Success This New Year

If you are like 38 percent of Americans, you set some goals this past weekend. Only 39 percent of those will make it through the first month. If you want to be in the winner’s circle next December, now is the time to lay the groundwork for success! Here are my top 5 books to get (and keep) you on track this year.

Mindset, Carol S. Dweck, PhD.

In this groundbreaking book, Stanford researcher Carol S. Dweck makes a case that all people fall into two categories- Fixed Mindset or Growth Mindset. People with a Fixed Mindset are limited by what they believe they have talent for while those with a Growth Mindset think about themselves as capable of change and growth. Important for individuals looking to break out of a rut and parents, educators, and business leaders. A must read for anyone looking to make changes in the new year.

Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, Marilee Adams

Written as an engaging fable, Marilee Adams shows how the questions you ask about your life and circumstances affect your outcomes and experiences. Rather than seeking to shift blame, she coaches us to ask the right questions leading to greater understanding of ourselves and others.

The Gap and The Gain: The high achievers guide to happiness, confidence, and success, Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

This book takes the wealth of information previously known only to the followers of Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach clients regarding mindset and breaks it down for the rest of us. The premise of the work is that we can either compare ourselves to an ever-changing goal or to our former selves. Those who keep their sights set on an elusive goal will never be satisfied and often feel unhappy and ungrateful. Conversely, when people compare themselves to their former selves, they will see progress and experience happiness and gratitude. This is an important read as you embark on the journey of new year goals.

Triggers: Creating behavior that lasts and becoming the person you want to be, Marshall Goldsmith

This book explores the way decisions are made in the moment and how they are influenced by our past experiences and habits. By taking stock of what your triggers are and how they affect your reactions, you can choose to change, becoming the person that you really want to be. Useful for both business leaders and daily life.

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankle

Having spent time in Nazi concentration camps, Viktor Frankle established the well-known thought school Logotherapy. In his groundbreaking book, Frankle explains that man’s main motivator is the search for meaning. When people lose sight of their purpose for living, they descend into hopelessness. He explains that there are two types of people, decent human beings, and indecent human beings. Regardless of your life circumstances, it is your daily choices which determine your mindset and character.

This year, you have the power and the tools to make real growth and change a reality.

3 Words to Start Your New Year Right

Dec 27, 2022 | Business Growth, Goal Setting, Leadership, Leadership Development, Motivation, Productivity, Strategic Planning, Success, Uncategorized

 

3 Words to Start Your New Year Right

Here in the hustle at the end of one year and the beginning of a new, it seems like everyone is talking about resolutions. The Oxford Dictionary defines resolution as “a firm decision to do or not to do something.” Success does depend on deciding to do a thing; but there is more to achievement than deciding and leaving the results to chance.

If you want to achieve remarkable things in 2023, take the next few days to get Clarity around what you want to do, clear the distractions to Focus, and strategize to get those Results.

Paul J. Meyer, founder of Success Motivation Institute, said “If you aren’t making the progress you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals aren’t clearly defined.” Over the years this has proven so true in my life and the lives of my clients.

Clarity – Do you have extreme clarity on your goals for 2023? Far too many people have clarity around what they don’t want in business and in their personal life rather than what they really want their future to look like. What matters most in your life and business? Hazy goals produce hazy results. SMART goals produce tangible results – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely.

Focus – Goals are meant to supply direction. This means you should have just a few significant goals. The more goals you have, the less focus is available. You will only achieve those goals to which you are fully committed.

Meyer also said, “Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.” Everything in that statement will exponentially take your power to focus to a new level.

Results – Results are tied to your system. A goal is the end-result you want to achieve personally and professionally. To really achieve an important goal, it is critical to have a system- a strategy.

You can’t keep doing what you’ve always done and expect different results. John Dryden said, “We first make our habits and then our habits make us.”  Your daily routine and rituals, daily huddles with team members and focus on high payoff activities are the keystone of your personal and professional life. Putting these systems in place will earn you the desired results.

Now, find a little time over the next week to sit down with your notetaking app of choice and get some clarity, focus and results to guide you through 2023.

Asking the Right Questions to Lead Your Team to Success

Nov 20, 2022 | Business Growth, Business Owners, Goal Setting, Leadership, Strategic Planning, Success, Uncategorized

Are you asking the right question to lead your team to success?

What Really Matters Most in life, leadership, and organizational development?

As we prepare to move into the coming year, let’s take a deep dive into this question. Essentially is it a question? Or is it a matter of focus? I believe it’s both.

In order to focus on your life, leadership, and organization, you must first address “What Really Matters Most?” as a question. To transform it from a question to a focus, you must assess where you are now compared with where you want to be.

Rather than reacting to past results and current circumstances, focus on “what really matters most” requires an awareness of and commitment to your vision and purpose. As the saying from Proverbs goes “without a vision, people perish.” There is no pragmatic way to determine how to spend our time, effort, energy and resources without answering this question.

Without focus, you become a victim of current achievements, constantly reworking to compensate for unintended outcomes. We must do some deep work to design our vision.

Today’s leaders face unprecedented positive and negative forces on organizational management. These forces of change present special challenges to leadership and to the workforce. To become a results-driven team, you need extreme clarity on your vision, purpose, and strategy communicated to all involved in supporting its execution. Organizational performance measurably improves as everyone develops an absolute focus on results. This companywide focus on ‘what really matters most’ allows all members to consistently create, develop, and track the results in tandem.

You also need to develop your leadership team, creating programs that give them tools to change their thinking and behavior to achieve sustainable results, growth, and profitability. By developing your people into self-leaders, they will grow and move forward to answer “What Really Matters Most” for your business.

Future looking leaders will use the competitive edge found in developing self-leadership in employees at all levels of the company. Your people are the ones to make it happen. Hence the need for clarity, focus, and a real understanding of “What Really Matters Most” at all levels. Do you have a winning strategy to get you to What Really Matters Most?  

Getting Results Through Others By Communicating More Effectively

May 4, 2021 | Leadership, Leadership Development, Productivity, Success

Probably the number one challenge for companies that I have found through working with my is  communicating effectively on a consistent basis. We have more ways to communicate than ever before in our history and yet in most cases do a terrible job at it. Many people in business communicate but few truly connect or are understood which leads to a lot of mutual mystification. For this reason, I want to review some way that we can communicate more effectively.  

Let’s look at a couple of areas:

The first area is communication factors.  Our communication consists of 3 factors: the words we use, the tone and inflection of those words and body language which includes facial expressions. Profesor Albert Mehrabian of the University of California in Los Angeles studied communicated and found that of our total communication message the words represent only 7%, the tonality is 38% and our body language is 55%. Right here we can see lots of ways for our communication may be misunderstood.

You can also use other models, such as the DISC model to understand communication styles. DISC is the universal language of observable human behavior. It creates a report that tells the assessment taker HOW they do what they do. One of the great values behind the DISC model is you can take an assessment and in 10 minutes identify your style and you can also learn the style of everyone on your team. Knowing each others’ communication style and adapting your style to communicate better is an excellent way to improve the communication of your team.

There are also barriers to Effective Communication that we must be aware of and seek to overcome. The first is attitude. The truth is people do things for their reasons, not ours, so we have to be in tune to their attitudes and values. Another is lack of trust – trust is earned and not bestowed, so it is important to develop a trusting relationship with the people we are communicating with in the workplace and every area of our lives.  The third is distractions – internal and external. External distractions surround us daily such as people, notifications on social media or e-mail, background noise. Internal distractions are our head trash, internal dialogue and/or lack of interest. We must seek to eliminate distractions whenever possible. Our preconceived thoughts and ideas can also negatively impact communication. These can include personal prejudices, perceptions, and personality traits. As we increase our own self-awareness, we can more easily identify which personal factors may be inhibiting our communication with others.  Lack of communication skill is another issue. Most people don’t really know how to connect and listen, it is important to study communication styles and practice effective communication.  Lack of concentration can cause us to miss important information and talking too much means we are not listening. Having an “I” focus is another major barrier to communication. When you are all about you and not the other person, you are not REALLY hearing what they are saying.

A Few Commandments of Good Communication

  1. Develop trust and credibility. It’s not automatically given; it must be earned. Authentic sincerity helps to create an atmosphere of trust.
  2. Effective communicators use the 5 C’s in their message: Clear, Complete, Concise, Concrete, and Correct.
  3. Every perspective is a perspective.
  4. What we hear and what we see depends largely on what we are listening and looking for.
  5. Openly communicate more than you have to or need to. Make it your top priority. Say what you mean. Say exactly what you mean.

The real question is: How do you know if you are successful at communicating? 

Clarity is the Antidote to Uncertainty

Sep 23, 2020 | CEOs, Goal Setting, Leadership, Strategic Planning, Success

We are living in crazy times and the levels of uncertainty are at an all-time high. Then, throw in the media blast telling us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and our situation seems much worse than it is. I am not minimizing the pandemic or the challenges we are being presented; however we have to take charge of our lives and look for the opportunities we can capitalize on. We CAN come through this storm BETTER than where we started.

I was just reading about Rockefeller in his early days in business –  the economy was in a recession and he took advantage of opportunities all around him. In every adversity there is an equal or greater benefit to be found. What are the obstacles that you are facing in your business today?  Have you met with your team to brainstorm ways to overcome the obstacles?

All of our decisions are based on assumptions/beliefs. Have we checked those beliefs against current reality  to see if they are real or not? Two business owners, facing similar obstacles, different decisions. Why? Because their beliefs/assumptions are different. So, whenever you’re facing an obstacle, one of the smartest things you can do is challenge your assumptions. Ask yourself why  you believe what you believe.

What’s the Cost of Doing Nothing? In general, most of the business owners I’ve met aren’t very good at calculating opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is involved in every decision we make daily because whenever we’re saying, “Yes” to one thing, we’re saying, “No,” to something else. This is the number one reason you want to have extreme clarity around your strategy, your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, Jim Collins, Good to Great), your purpose and your core values. Once you have clarity around these issues you can start to make better decisions.

One of the ways of solving any problem is to get a different perspective. As soon as we ask questions of ourselves and of our teams our brains will go to work and come up with an answer. One of the best ways to ask that question is to imagine that you’re someone else and then ask how you think you (being that person) would solve this problem. For example, if you were Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Howard Shultz or Sheryl Sandberg.  Pick the person and ask: “If ______ were in my Shoes, how would he/she solve this problem or overcome this obstacle?”

Most strategies fail because of lack of execution, being driven by the tyranny of the urgent, being pulled by the inertia of daily operations.  Don’t let that happen to you.

How Important is it for You to Get the Next 6 Months Right?

Sep 17, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Leadership, Leadership Development, Strategic Planning, Success

In light of everything that has happened so far this year, what your going to do intentionally to ensure that the next months of 2020 are a success for you and your business? Do you have a clear and specific, written plan of action? Are you ready and equipped to thrive in the months ahead instead of simply surviving from crisis to crisis?

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” Creating a plan and leaving it on a shelf to collect dust, never reviewing it or adapting it to changes in your market or the current economy is absolutely useless. Plans are meant to be revisited and refreshed and often your goals may need to be realigned. We are certainly not able to predict everything that is going to happen but if we are committed to planning, we will be more likely to thrive regardless of what happens.

Our plans are the framework for success. Even if we have to rewrite them, they will keep us on track toward achieving our core purpose. Lewis Carroll said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” So, know where you are going and be willing to do what it takes to get there. Are you willing to set the time aside you need to plan for the future? Are you willing to do this routinely? How important is it for you, really, to get the next 6 months right? Do you have the team to help you get there? Are you developing your leaders? Are you working on your own personal and professional development?

The time is now! Don’t wait any longer!

If you are ready and willing to do what it takes join our Fast Track Strategic Plan Challenge beginning September 21, 2020 at 12 PM. Spaces are limited, so sign up today by clicking here.