Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about thinking and focusing on the most important things.

In business the important things are the top money making activities, crafting them so they work most of the time and then, of course, implementing those money making activities in highly effective ways and frequently enough to make your goals for income and wealth building happen. 

It’s about lining up all the things you need to consistently take bold direct action and get things done.

Master-Mind is all about that.

THE FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION

“If we were having a discussion three years from today, and you were looking back over those three years, what has to happen in your life, personally and professionally, for you to feel happy with the progress of your business?” 

This question gets asked a lot in Master-Mind Alliance meetings. It’s the vision thing. It describes what you want for your future life. The FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION is about INTENTIONS, Grand INTENTIONS. And those drive 90% of what we work toward securing in life and through our business activities. 

The FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION asks us to imagine who we'll they be just three years hence. It asks that we create in our mind a "Future Self", not only in our professional life, who we’ll be as a successful business person, but also who we’ll be personally, what our personal life will be like. 

Now imagine you have answered the FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION, you have created an image of that future time, what I would do next is ask that you to use that image to make decisions in the present, today. Over the next three years, I'd ask that you continually use that image of who are going to be three years from now to make decisions and to make changes today that will fit that future you. It'll be important. That image of a FUTURE YOU will be the basis upon which you communicate with others and decide how you take action.

Once INTENTIONS are clear and driving decisions and plans, we can more on to the next thing…BEHAVIOR. With clear INTENTIONS we can start focusing on the behavior it will take for us to get to the FUTURE SELF place. This will drive additional decisions and formulations and re-formulations of STRUCTURE and continual adjustments to GRAND STRATEGY and the creation of GAME PLANS and all the rest of the stuff that is Master-Mind Alliance. 

All from a simple question about three years hence. It’s a big deal this little question.

STRESS BE GONE

Stress has been called the silent killer, because unbridled run-away stress can have a disastrous effect on our health: heart attack, stroke, diabetes, insanity, certain cancers and other life-shortening human maladies and pesky unpleasant chronic conditions or bad habits often have stress as a significant contributing factor. Yup, stress can kill us, probably won’t kill us, at least not today. But normal everyday stress, or more accurately our reaction to it, will surely cause us grief at times, can make us feel a little crazy once in a while and can make it so we waste a lot of our energy as well as give us plenty about which to worry needlessly. And besides hurting us physically and emotionally, unbridled stress can also ruin our otherwise perfectly good business. We cannot let that happen.

Truthfully, we cannot get rid of all the stress in our life, so we ought not to waste our time trying. Besides we need some stress to motivate us, otherwise we’d never get out of bed in the morning. Clearly we don’t want a level of stress that makes us sick or anxious or worried all the time or the kind that makes us feel like we need to work 12 hour days because that destroys our business.

It would be smart of us to spend some quality time understanding all we can about how the stress in our lives affects us. We’d be doing ourselves a brilliant favor if we’d master effective healthy ways to react to stress. Maybe it’s time for us to build some new life habits particularly concerning what we eat and how much exercise we get. And surely we want to learn to channel our reaction to the pressure, anxiety and tension we encounter into healthy outlets so we’re rarely if ever living in overwhelm mode and freaking out needlessly. And working 12 hours days, who wants that? Yup, dealing more effectively with ordinary stress, that’d be good!

WE CAN DO ANYTHING

One of the oldest rivalries in college football is between University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. It just so happens that I grew up in South Bend and my family had season tickets the Notre Dame games. I was a big fan. We went to all the home games and I knew about the USC rivalry. So when we went to the USC games, I played close attention to everything that happened. And at one of these games, my life changed.

Somewhere, during the first half, the USC running back made a nice first down and time out was called. During that time out, the play-by-play announcer just casually happened to mention that the USC running back was an Academic All-American… who also had the distinction of graduating from his high school at age 15. Then he started USC the fall of that year. I was 9 years old at the time so I found that very interesting. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The announcer went on to say that this young man had already finished all of his academic graduation requirements and had entered into medical school at USC. So, while he was on the football team he was also going to medical school—at the same time! I was flabbergasted, dumfounded, literally stunned! Here’s why.

My father, grandfather, grandmother and one of my uncles were all physicians. For years I had heard stories about how hard, extremely stressful and all-consuming it was to get into and then graduate from medical school. So the idea of playing on a football team while going to medical school at the same time seemed impossible to me. How could anyone do that? I could hardly manage elementary school and I didn’t play any sport.

Well, suffice to say I was fascinated about this. And although I had no name for it, didn’t know what to call it, at that moment my interest in the concept we now call Peak Performance and the Psychology of Achievement began. And I wanted to know more about this stuff.

I left the stadium that day feeling challenged. I wanted to look at my life and see if I could do any more than just muddle along like I’d always done. Could I possibly be really good at something? This is what I asked myself for the first time.

THE LESSON HERE IS YES, WE CAN DO GREAT THINGS. We have to understand, as I did thanks to that football game experience long ago, that if other people can do great things—can excel to great heights, achieve mastery over something, do wonderful things in sports or business or any facet of life—if others can do it, we might be able to do it too. At a minimum, we can always to better. This is what I learned at that football game on a cold winter day in South Bend when I was just a kid. And I’ve never forgotten it.

WINNING MONEY MAKING GRAND STRATEGY

I once wrote a book entitled “How Come You’re Not Rich Yet?” That’s a favorite question I like to ask business owners. Here’s why. We know how people can get rich in business. It’s not a secret. You just have to do enough of what’s known to work. Now it won’t be easy, but we do know what do to. And if you want to grow real big, you can become a millionaire or a billionaire if you want that.

Speaking of getting rich, Forbes Magazine recently published their annual list of billionaires in the world today. There are 1153 of them. I think the list needs some further refinement because some of these billionaires did nothing to make their money. They are on the list only because they inherited their wealth from a previous generation. I don’t care about them. I’m interested in the billionaires who are not members of the Wal-Mart family or the Saudi Arabian sheikdom and who did not literally stumble into a long lost pirate treasure. The self-made entrepreneurial billionaires in the world are the people I want to talk about. And every single one of those boys and girls is an owner of an extremely profitable business, that they founded, that serves many (or large) customers. It is from their personal creativity coupled with the sweat of their very hard work that these individuals became billionaires.

Here’s the significant point. Every one of these self-made entrepreneurial billionaires has a GRAND STRATEGY that works splendidly. They’ve figured out how to do business excellently. They have what in the Master-Mind Alliance we call a DONE BUSINESS. That’s like having an MBA in your own business. And according to the money, the DONE BUSINESSES these self-made Forbes billionaires own has made them a ton of money.

Big time success in business for you, just like for the entrepreneurial billionaires in the world, requires splendid GRAND STRATEGY. GRAND STRATEGY includes many things. The centerpiece, the engine that drives GRAND STRATEGY is your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR. That’s the fire in the belly… and it must be splendid and stay splendid. 

SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR is all the things you say and all the things do that bring in the money. That has got to work. And you got to be able to do enough of it. Then, when you have access to a large enough pool of potential buyers… because your marketing works… you ought to be able to make as much money as you could ever want, right? YES.

If you have splendid GRAND STRATEGY and if you routinely wield splendid SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR and if you routinely have access to a large enough pool of potential buyers of what you sell… there’s no reason in the world why you cannot get rich… if that is what you so desire, because that’s all it ever takes, that’s all it has ever taken and all it will ever take to get rich.  

SPLENDID GRAND STRATEGY, SPLENDID SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR and a SPLENDID CONNECTION TO A POOL OF POTENTIAL BUYERS… what else could you ever want for your business?

Now then, if you’re not RICH YET, or close to it… the only reason for that is that your GRAND STRATEGY is not yet SPLENDID. Something is askew. Your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR needs some improvement. Or, maybe it works just fine, but for some reason, you’re unable to do enough of it.

Please understand this. With nine YES or NO questions, we can examine the causes for that being less that rich yet predicament and perhaps find a place to begin improvements. Go through this with me and let’s see.

1. Do you have a ROAD MAP, some document that sets forth crystal clear INTENTIONS about money goals, growth projections, time you want to spend working and such? YES/NO. If you answer NO to this we cannot go any further. We’ve found our place to start making improvements.

2. Do you sell goods, products and services that people genuinely need or want? YES/NO

3. Can people afford to buy those things from you? YES/NO.

4. When they buy from you do you make a decent profit? YES/NO.

5. Can you thoroughly describe your ideal best customer? YES/NO. If NO, you can’t go any further. You must know this cold.

6. Are you making enough potential buyers find out about you? Is your customer or client attraction process working smoothly? YES/NO. If the answer is NO, could it be that your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR needs some adjustment or perhaps a major overhaul? YES/NO.

When you consider the effectiveness of your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR and find that something is missing we need to get into that, don’t we? Yeah. Because if we can figure that out… and can remedy that situation, if we can make your SALES GENERATION BEHAVIOR, including your marketing and advertising, work better, then you just need to do more of that, right? Yup!

7. Do you know how to make your marketing work better? The answer to this question is often NO. Sometimes it’s a YES BUT, meaning you’re not doing enough of what you should be doing. When we get a YES BUT, we need to probe deeper into that.

8. Are you being constrained or held back? YES/NO. If you are being unnaturally inhibited we need to know by what or whom.

9. Finally, we come to this question. Do you think there are other people in the world who sell what you do… yet who make more money than you do? YES. How do they do that? Are they doing things you are not doing? DON’T KNOW. Would you like to find out? YES.

Okay, by running through these nine questions, we can find a starting point, a place from which to grow your business by making improvements in INTENTIONS, STRUCTURES and BEHAVIORS.

The thing that makes it possible to become a billionaire is splendid GRAND STRATEGY. GRAND STRATEGY is about INTENTIONS (goals, ambition and motivation) plus STRUCTURES (mechanisms, systems and arrangements that make it possible for a business to function and achievement to happen) and finally BEHAVIOR (all forms of appropriate business action and activity where the rubber meets the road).

A huge part of the DONE Business Solution is figuring out what needs to happen for you to make more money. Once we have a starting point, start making improvements to your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR, improving the things you say and do to bring in the money, then your entire GRAND STRATEGY can function more SPLENDIDLY. As a business person, it’s your main job to arrange your life so you can do lots and lots of whatever your splendid SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR happens to be.

Now one more thing about those self-made Forbes billionaires, in the beginning everyone one of them worked real hard to make themselves wealthy. But after a while, they didn’t work so hard anymore. They don’t even work smart. They worked BETTER… and BETTER is better. It just is. In fact, that’s the trick in life. You win by being BETTER. BETTER wins the day. So go out and Be BETTER By Choice. That’s what I leave you with here. You can do that. You know you that you can do BETTER because others have. And if others can do it, so can you. 

ATTITUDE: OURS SHOULD NOT SUCK!

People say attitude is everything. You’ve heard that right? Sure. But what are they really saying? And what exactly is attitude?

An attitude is a favorable or unfavorable evaluation, disposition or judgment that represents our degree of like or dislike, or positive or negative view for someone or something or some event or some idea, notion or belief. That someone, something, idea, notion or belief can be referred to as the attitude object. We can also say that attitude is one of the ways we communicate our mood to others, for example, through smiling or frowning or shrugging our shoulders. When we are optimistic and anticipate successful encounters, we transmit a positive attitude and people usually respond favorably. When we are pessimistic and expect the worst, our attitude is often negative, and people tend to avoid us. It is the way we look at things mentally. We can add a bit more to our definition by saying that attitude is an inward feeling expressed by outward behavior. To some extent or other, we always project on the outside what we feel on the inside… about other people about ourselves, about all sorts of things. And, yes those projections of ours drive our behavior. So attitude determines behavior… that’s why attitude matters so much.

Complicating matters a bit, we can be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object, meaning that we simultaneously possess both positive and negative attitudes toward the item in question. Isn’t that nice, this is just one more part of the confusion of normal life.

Now then, no one wants to be a victim of anything ever. And undeniably we have the capability to live the life we want. We may not get everything we want but we can get a lot. If we believe we can and if we behave appropriately. And belief and most of our behavior is a matter of choice, our choice, choice we get to make every moment of our existence.

Here’s the thing. We can design a whole lot of our own life experience. I hope you believe that because it’s true. As a start, we can actively improve our life experience by managing and directing our attitudes… and yes indeed we can do that. We can set our daily mood through attitude. Of course I recommend setting a positive mood and a can-do attitude because going the other way would be silly. This daily mental SET UP activity helps us get into FLOW and live in the ZONE, helps us live proactively rather than reactively.

What are FLOW and the ZONE? We’ll let’s get to that next.

Born in 1934, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is a Hungarian psychology professor who immigrated to the United States at the age of 22. He’s he is the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College and now teaches at Claremont Graduate University east of Los Angles.  

Csíkszentmihályi is noted for both his work in the study of happiness and creativity and also for his notoriously difficult to pronounce name. He is best known as the architect of the notion of FLOW and for his years of research and writing on the topic. He is the author of many books and over 120 articles or book chapters. He is the world’s leading researcher on positive psychology. He once said “Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.” Proactively adopting a desirable set of attitudes about ourselves helps make this happen.

So FLOW, what is that? FLOW is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. And the ZONE is a place where mind and body work in perfect synch and decisions and actions seem to happen without conscious effort. For a very happy life, you want to get into FLOW and the ZONE and stay there.

Once in FLOW and the ZONE, should you have a disappointment of some sort, you need to immediately ask yourself why did I not perform well today? Was it poor planning and preparation? Was my focus and concentration off? Was it a mistake in execution? Figure that out, and then get yourself to a place of peace with that situation. Don’t get down on yourself. Achieving that place of peace is the key to avoiding a full-fledged slump. A slump—that downward spiral that only gets worse the harder you try—is familiar to, well to everybody.

Professor Csikszentmihalyi identified nine elements of FLOW that he saw repeatedly in his research:

1. There are clear goals every step of the way. In many everyday situations, there are contradictory demands and it’s sometimes quite unclear what should occupy our attention. But in a flow experience, we have a clear purpose and a good grasp of what to do next.

2. There is immediate feedback to one’s actions. When we’re in FLOW, we know how well we’re doing.

3. There is a balance between challenges and skills. If a challenge is too demanding compared to our skill level, we get frustrated. If it’s too easy, we get bored. In a flow experience, there is a pretty good match between our abilities and the demands of the situation. We feel engaged by the challenge, but not overwhelmed.

4. Action and awareness are merged. We are often thinking about something that happened – or might happen – in another time or place. But in flow, we’re concentrated on what we’re doing.

5. Distractions are excluded from consciousness. Because we’re absorbed in the activity, we’re only aware of what’s relevant to the task at hand, and we don’t think about unrelated things. By being focused on the activity, unease that can cause anxiety and depression is set aside.

6. There is no worry of failure. In a state of FLOW, we’re too involved to be concerned about failing. We just don’t think about failure. We know what has to be done and we just do it.

7. Self-consciousness disappears. We often spend a lot of mental energy monitoring how we appear to others. In a FLOW state, we’re too involved in the activity to care about protecting our ego. We might even feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Paradoxically, the experience of letting go of “the self” can strengthen it.

8. Our sense of time becomes distorted. Time flies when we’re really engaged. On the other hand, time may seem to slow down at the moment of executing some action for which we’ve trained and developed a high degree of skill.

9. The activity becomes “autotelic” (an end in itself, done for it’s own sake). Some activities are done for their own sake, for the enjoyment an experience provides, like most art, music, or sports. Other activities, which are done for some future purpose or goal – like things we have to do as part of our job – may only be a means to an end. But some of these goal-oriented activities can also become ends in themselves, and enjoyed for their own sake.

Csikszentmihalyi concludes his list by saying that “in many ways, the secret to a happy life is to learn to get flow from as many of the things we have to do as possible.”

Big True Fact: the biggest predictor of behavior or of our performance is MENTAL STATE. If we feel good then this positive mental state will be reflected in the quality of our performance. So, it’s a wonderfully good idea to spend a few minutes before every performance getting ourselves into a resourceful mental state to dramatically increase our chances of performing well. EMOTIONAL REHEARSAL is one way to do this.

So where do attitudes fit into FLOW and the ZONE? Well, it turns out that programing our attitudes is a powerful form of EMOTIONAL REHEARSAL. See where I’m going with this?

Why does this matter so much, because ATTITUDE DRIVES BEHAVIOR. That outward manifestation of action that’s driven by the inward feeling (or attitude) is expressed in what we do or do not do, and that’s behavior. Behavior has to come from somewhere and attitude is a BIG determinate of it. Even our body language is a result of our mental attitude. And this is great to understand because it gives us some choice. We can choose our attitude. We get to do that every moment of every day. And by deliberately choosing our attitude we get ourselves into a mood and then we automatically send out a message that everyone understands, consciously or unconsciously. Then, our action (behavior) and the actions of others (their behavior) can be made to flow or follow from that act of deliberately choosing an attitude and an associated mood. Isn’t that something? Indeed, we have more control over our environment (meaning the people around us) than we might think… neat huh.

A positive attitude also enhances our creativity. Being Positive helps our minds think freely. Sounds like FLOW huh? Yup! When we do the daily SET UP the emotionally forecast our activities for the foreseeable future, fresh ideas and solutions rise to the surface. Obviously if we SET UP a negative attitude that would have a stifling effect and our creativity would be suffocated. That would be stupid.

Now we understand about positive attitude, EMOTIONAL REHEARSAL, FLOW and the ZONE it follows that we ought to understand how to control our minds and thus achieve these desirable states that help us live happily. So let’s do that next.

And our friend Jeffrey Gitomer, the sales guru, has something to say about this. Gitomer discusses the importance and a YES Attitude and a NO Attitude.

He says have a having a YES! Attitude is Fundamental…

·        To sales

·        To service

·        To employee loyalty

·        To customer loyalty

·        To success

·        To family

·        To life itself!

And he says that having a NO! Attitude is Fundamental…

·        To time sinks

·        To energy sinks

·        To complexity

·        To insanity

·        To stopping

·        To stupid people

·        To bad habits!

To survive and thrive we need both a YES Attitude and a NO Attitude. And NO needs to come first.

I think Gitomer is stating the obvious. It’s a good idea to be proactive about our attitudes, to focus on two simple categories, YES and NO, and to make a list of people, things, events, habits and such to avoid attaching mental energy too, and another list of people, things, events, habits and such to embraced with positivity, optimism and confidence.

Let’s pull all this together. Every day, when we get out of bed we get to decide a few things. Will this be a good day or a terrible day? It’s a matter of choice folks. We get to decide.

What attitude will I project and carry with me today? Optimism, pessimism or what? Yup we get to set that up.

What’s on my plate for today at work and how will I experience those activities emotionally? Will I be triumphant or down in the dumps and sad or depressed? Will I roll with the punches and have as happy a day as I can? More decisions, more of how our day will develop that we can manage at part of our SET UP.

Doing this SET UP requires discipline and practice, lots of practice. But the rewards are substantial. FLOW and the ZONE await us.

“Today is your day; your mountain is waiting, so get on your way.” ~Dr. Seuss

“The future belongs to the common man with uncommon determination.” ~Anonymous

“Thoughts (our daily SET UP time) which are mixed with any of the feelings of emotion constitute a ‘magnetic’ force which attracts other similar or related thoughts.” ~Napoleon Hill

So there we are. We get to determine how we live and what we feel, neat huh. And attitude plays a huge role in this. I welcome your opinions, comments and feedback. 

ARE YOU READY FOR A DONE BUSINESS?

I want to describe a concept called A DONE Business. So first things being first I should define what I mean by a DONE Business.

A DONE Business is a nearly perfect small business or professional practice that makes the owner or owners very happy. It's truly a money making machine. It cranks out money and is easy to operate. It also dazzles customers so everybody wins! Neat huh.

Well there's a bit more to it than that. Here are the details.

Any business that offers products and services people want or need, that can be sold at a price prospective buyers can afford, and then cost effectively delivered, for a decent profit, can be transformed into a DONE BUSINESS.

And when you have a DONE BUSINESS anytime you want, you can crank up the marketing and sell more and you can take lots of worry free time off.

We know how to make all this happen, it's not a secret. It’s a matter of structure, strategy and behavior. And it’s simple. It’s not always easy but still straight forward and simple. 

To tell if you can transform your existing business into a DONE Business ask yourself if you can answer YES to these questions: 1) Do you sell things people need or want? 2) Can the people who can be made to know about what you offer afford to buy from you? 3) Can you cost effectively deliver what you sell, at a decent profit? 4) Do you like what you do? if you can honesty answer YES to these four questions, then you can have a DONE BUSINESS and the great life that goes with it.

A few words about me.

Since about 1979, I've been consulting and coaching small business owners and operators. First in the San Francisco Bay Area and since 1996, in Eureka, California, which is in the northern coastal region of the state.

I have a great job. I cannot think of anything else I could possibly do. In fact, I can't do anything else. Can't fix a car. Can't ... well I can do a few other things but I love my job. So, I'll keep at it.