DOUBLE AND HALF

Let me put this as simply as I can. If you own a small business... and if your business is viable, that is... if you can answer a resounding YES to 13 Simple Questions, then you are poised and ready to... wait for it... DOUBLE YOUR INCOME and cut the time you spend working in HALF. 

We absolutely, positively know how to make this happen. In any economy in any kind of business. 

There is no mystery here, no big secret. Doubling your income and cutting the time you spend working in half requires the application of strategies that are known to work and nothing more. And we know what those strategies are. We do. 

The hard work part of making this happen is getting a resounding YES answer to the 13 Simple Questions.

And once poised and ready, it will take you about two to three years to get there, to DOUBLE and HALF. But, don't you think it will be worth it. Of course. So why not? Why not now? Why not you now?

MARKETING 
MAKE YOURS WORK BETTER

Our CHALK TALK for October is entitled “Marketing - Make Yours Work Better.” It is true that if you put your offer forward, out into the market place, eloquently enough, your stuff will sell big time. But if you’re like most small business people, you do not have a college degree in marketing. So what are you to do? You certainly want to sell more stuff. But how? What are your best marketing options, the ones that will make your marketing work better?

When you can SHOW your target market that what you do solves a problem, makes their life easier or gives them pleasure in some way, sales will happen and your business will take off. 

But if that’s not happening for you now, here are some underlying causal factors that may be holding you back. 

• No written marketing plan
• No clearly identified target customer or client
• Offer is vague or not compelling
• No measurement or accountability
• Not enough time or money budgeted
• Poorly organized
• No follow-through
• Too often caught up in the tyranny of the urgent
• Don’t know how to talk (negotiate) so as to close enough sales

Any one of these things can kill your marketing before you start. If you have one of these issues or more than one going on, then you've found your place to begin making improvements. 

Bottom line, your marketing message must do three things. First, it must CAPTURE ATTENTION. There’s a reason why people will spend thousands of dollars on a TV commercial or on a logo design. These things have to work, to almost instantly grab the attention of whoever see, hears or experiences them in some fashion. 

Second, your marketing message must CLARIFY. It must show what’s unique or special or how what you offer will help or solve a problem or give pleasure to the buyer.

Third, your marketing message must COMPEL. It must be crafted in such a way as to make it so some people, hopefully a lot of people, respond to it by calling or by coming in or by emailing or by visiting your website and eventually, again hopefully, buying from you sooner rather than later.

If the topic "Marketing - Make Yours Work Better" is of interest to you, and you’d like to attend the October meeting of the Master-Mind Alliance as a guest and listen to what we have to say about all this, call us and we’ll make it happen. Who knows, it could change your life.

INTEREST & AMBITION TOO

INTEREST: Most people like doing whatever it is that they do for a living. Some love it. Can you imagine a carpenter not liking wood or nails or an accountant not liking precision with numbers? No. “The most important thing in life is interest.” John Houston, the famous Hollywood movie director said that. So if you own a business, and plan to work at it for years and years, two things stand out. First, you’d better find it interesting. Second, you’d better like it huh. Yeah.

And…similar to INTEREST…we have AMBITION.

AMBITION: How bad do you want that thing you find interesting? Whether it is building the business of your dreams, making a million bucks, becoming famous, finding eternal beauty or just having a few moments of serene peace and quiet, ambition is a part of that. Ambition drives us all…it's what the first psychology teacher in the United States, William James, called the worship of the Bitch Goddess Success.

Here’s the whole quote taken from a letter William James wrote to HG Wells, September 11, 1906. “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success, together with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success, is our national disease.”

Now Freud would have us believe that all drive stems from the libido. Sorry Sigmund, success is biologically determined by one’s own ability to stay focused on a task and persistence is a function of an active limbic system. Focus and persistence are influenced by desire and training and practice and discipline and determination and so on.

So INTEREST and AMBITION…what can we say about these two concepts? 

AMBITION fuels our desire for success and INTEREST steers us in a direction in which our success can be achieved. We can say this because it’s true. One the down side, some people are cursed with ambition, it ruins their lives, for they have no interest in anything else, like relationships and love and family. But for most of us, ambition works just fine.

If you’ve ever been in a job interview you may have heard a question like the following. Can you give a brief outline of the tasks which have your specific interest and ambitions? If you are unprepared to answer a question like this it can be devastating, and your chance for a job offer...gone in a hurry.

Then there is this wonderful little question. What would you do IF you knew you could not fail? And if you can answer that, then there is this follow-up question. What should be next? In other words, once armed with the answer to the first question how will you change your life?

Okay, you say, so what now?

Well now we can ask what would make a person with a certain ambition and interest enjoy that particular interest even more. Well, a person with a certain interest might enjoy that particular interest even more if he or she got better at doing it, don’t you think? Sure, that’s logical. They would derive more intrinsic pleasure if they could pursue their interest more successfully or simply…do it better. When they would perform the activities fundamental to their interest flawlessly, that would give them temporary or even lasting moments of joy, right? Yup. They might also enjoy their interest more if they were rewarded for doing it more dramatically, as with a round of applause or more financial remuneration, you know, more money. That would probably make them happier, don’t you think? So let’s talk about how an ambitious person with a particular interest might pursue it more vigorously and successfully, and if it’s business related, make more money doing that thing they love.

Here are a couple of things that come to mind.

Create And Keep A Morning Phrase: “Today I will get all my important stuff done…before noon in fact.” Whatever you say to yourself in the morning, if you sincerely mean it and if you stay focused on it, it will most likely come true during the day. Why not taking advantage of this? Create a simple morning phrase and say it to yourself first thing in the morning and a couple of more times during the morning. Is that simple?

Change Your Work Space: Clean up your desk. Re-arrange the furniture. Add some color to that space. Make the place where you work really enjoyable. So enjoyable that work there won’t be perceived as work anymore. It will be something you love to do.

Let’s do one more.

Wake Up Early: This is not a habit, this is a lifestyle. Don’t just wake up early without a purpose. Be early. Be there before others, while it’s still and quiet. Decide what matters most to you that day. Write it down. Look for new opportunities and embrace them. Waking up early means keeping your eyes open to every available opportunity…and pursuing all your interests with all your might. 

THE 5 MINUTE RULE

We like positive habits. We don’t like negative habits. Positive habits are good. Negative habits are bad. Everyone understands this. We also know that we don’t like wasting time when we’re trying to be productive. I’m not talking about procrastinating, that’s a subject for another article and I have a great deal to say about that. I’m talking about distractions, going pulled off on a tangent or being interrupted. Distractions that take our attention off something we consider important abound. In fact life is one great big hailstorm of distractions…and they can ruin an otherwise productive day or string of days. Ugh! 

The 5 Minute Rule is a Get-R-DONE Habit designed to keep you on the path to success every day. Here’s how it works. 

A few times a day, you stop what you’re doing, pause, take five minutes, and ask yourself this question. What Am I Doing? If the answer is—just what I want to be or should be or planned to be doing—then keep on doing that. But if your answer is—something urgent but not important, or I’m chasing something that has distracted me and working on it is keeping me from being productive, from pursuing what will make my day today a success—then stop doing that thing and refocus your attention and concentration on the important things you have to do or should do with the rest of your day. 

This simple little habit can be one of the best focusing and re-prioritizing routines you've ever embraced.

Now, here’s what some people do make this work splendidly. We all have computers and many of us have smart phones. It is eminently possible to make these devices remind us, with a friendly beep, when it’s time for an appointment or some such thing. So, I recommend you set your computer or smart phone to beep you twice a day, at 10:30 AM and 2:30 PM. The beep is your cue to stop what you’re doing and ask yourself the What Am I Doing Question. 

The rest is easy, refocus and get more done that day.

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!