Category: Success Attitude

Article Contributed by Dr. Joey Faucette 

Daylight Savings Time starts this week in most of the U.S. We “lose an hour” to supposedly gain more sunlight at the end of the day.

So how do you deal with this lost hour?

And for that matter, all the other lost hours of productivity at work?

Here are 3 strategies the Positively Successful use to save time:

Priorities

Dr. Covey was fond of saying, “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

What are your priority activities that maximize your productivity and profitability? That 20 percent that contributes 80 percent?

Once you identify them, you positively save time because your focus sharpens. You consciously aim for achieving these priorities in a timely manner that keeps you moving forward.

Your priorities grow roots in the unique contribution you bring to your team. You do your part. When teammates unify around priorities with each one utilizing a different skill set, the company’s mission takes flight. Productive, profit-enriching activities become priority.

Productivity

When you set boundaries, especially around technology, you do more in an hour than many of your peers accomplish in a month.

The intrusive nature of always-on technology leaps with ease over the necessary boundaries for creating maximum productivity today. To be more productive so you generate more profit, you employ border guards like turning off your automatic updates and notifications, setting appointments with yourself to return emails and voicemails, using the DND and off buttons regularly, and other such attention-defining activities.

Multi-tasking is a myth. Intuitively you know it. Doing something consciously to rein it in is your best next step.

Profit

The obvious profit metric is money. More money grows from better priorities and productivity.

What about other metrics? A less tangible and equally important profit is your personal satisfaction with a job well done that calls upon your native talents. This profit insures your continuing emotional engagement with your work.

Also, you profit from work activities that align with and give expression to your core values. You benefit from opportunities that give expression to your best how you do what you do.

Such profits grow from your productivity and priorities which prompts you to save time to invest in doing what you love with those you love. That’s how you create your Work Positive lifestyle like the Positively Successful enjoy!

Article Contributed by Dr. Joey Faucette 

While studying Great Depression businesses created by successful entrepreneurs, I discovered five core practices that were daily habits for them. They asked themselves five questions daily that charted their course to success.

You become a successful business person, also, by asking yourself these same five questions daily. The five questions to ask so you become positively successful are:

What Am I Thinking?

It really is all in your head. Your thoughts guide your every action, relationship, and sale. Your thoughts either help or hinder your journey through the current economy. Your business either succeeds or sucks because of your thoughts.

Positively successful people guard their thoughts religiously, insuring that they only rent space to positive ones. They place border guards around their mind that maintain a singular perspective: focus on the positive and filter out the negative. They have little patience with purveyors of negativity—think 24/7 news channels—and constantly feed their minds mentally positive nourishment.

Who Am I Attracting?

While success begins in your head, it bears fruit in relationships with customers, clients, suppliers, team members and others with whom you invest time. As Jim Rohn reminded us so well, “You are the average of the five persons with whom you spend the most time.”

Positively successful professionals guard their relationships like their thoughts, insuring they invest time only in positive ones. They have firm social boundaries that limit availability to negative persons—“Eeyore Vampires”—and focus on attracting ideal customers, clients, team members, and suppliers. They know it costs too much to do business with some people and delete their contact databases accordingly.

Why Am I Working?

Success begins in your head, and reflects back through relationships into your heart. “Why am I working?” clarifies your purpose and desire. Successful people engage emotionally on a passionately positive level with their labor. Their work matters.

This positive engagement fuels their imagination and frees them emotionally to discover solutions to customers’ problems in innovative, added-value ways. Such creative expression satisfies their “Why?” and furthers their success journey.

How Am I Doing?

Positively successful business people understand that the what, who, and why questions beg for reflection, i.e., “How am I doing?” The key is to acknowledge areas for improvement while accelerating what’s moving forward now.

Their singular focus is, “How am I best and strategically acting on my what, who, and why?” This positive focus is the clear pathway to successful achievements.

Where Am I Going?

These Great Depression gurus understood that once positive results emerge from their positive mental, social, and emotional achievements, the successful path requires sustaining. You must keep going.

They discovered that what serves them best is to serve others. They ethically acted in the best interests of their team and community, giving servant leadership to improve others’ lives daily. Gratitude for their achievements fueled their philanthropy.

So how’s your work? Ask yourself these five questions daily and enjoy success as you Work Positive! 

About the Author

Dr. Joey Faucette is the #1 Amazon best-selling author of Work Positive in a Negative World (Entrepreneur Press), Positive Success coach, & speaker who helps business professionals increase sales with greater productivity so they leave the office earlier to do what they love with those they love. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org.

Article Contributed Dr. Joey Faucette

I live in a part of the U.S. that received a once-a-decade snowfall last week. At least 12,000 flights were cancelled. Millions of people were home from work, rearranging untold numbers of meetings and assignments.

Such rapid change is commonplace in our world today. Snow is forecast. Other changes are not. How you deal with it determines your positive success at work.

Here are five secret steps the positively successful take in response to such rapid change:

Relax

When sudden change interrupts your work flow, your fight-or-flight response to stress emerges just as quickly. You will go thermonuclear or turbodrive away due to an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

Successful business people first relax. They take a breath and see the moment as it is. They resist the urge to go Incredible Hulk or Chicken Little and focus on the positive.

Relate

Successful professionals secondly relate. They quickly turn to others and invest in their social circles. They offer support and gain strength from relationships.

Facebook was filled with pictures of parents at home, playing in the snow with their children. Residents of neighborhoods near highways left their warm homes to push cars stranded in roadside ditches.

Once you relax in the midst of rapid change, your focus shifts from “me” to “thee.” You relate to and invest in others.

Remember

Next, successful business people look behind the moment to previously similar times. They reflect on what they implemented that was most effective. They gather courage and strength from the knowledge that they survived and are in business today. Such emotional fortitude energizes them to deal strategically with the moment.

Everyone has a survival story. Such tales willingly suspend your disbelief in the moment and propel you forward.

Respond

Having relaxed, related, and remembered, successful professionals now choose to respond. Interestingly, the temptation is to first respond. However, success builds from well-chosen inner steps before it emerges in outer steps.

The focusing question behind your response is, “What can I do?” The powerlessness of rapid change paralyzes with a myopic view of “What I Can’t Do.” There is always some sliver of an opportunity open to successful people. They see what they look for. Seizing the moment, they respond with creative imagination and transform the paralysis into a powerful rewriting of the script.

They find an appointment for the patient who stayed overnight in hopes of seeing the doctor. They let the client text the picture of the damaged vehicle direct to claims. They respond positively and creatively.

Reward

Finally, successful business people reward themselves. They take off earlier than usual to play in the snow.

Also, they reward others. They gift the team member who came in on Saturday to complete what couldn’t be done on Friday.

Rewards recognize the importance of others to the success of the business. This secret step may be the greatest of all as it hooks the team member’s emotional engagement in a most personal way. Successful professionals lead from heartfelt recognition that it takes more than themselves to navigate rapid change.

Whatever your source of change, implement these five secret steps of the positively successful and Work Positive!  

About the Author

Dr. Joey Faucette is the #1 Amazon best-selling author of Work Positive in a Negative World (Entrepreneur Press), Positive Success coach, & speaker who helps business professionals increase sales with greater productivity so they leave the office earlier to do what they love with those they love. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org.

We sat around the table, about 7 of us, die hard networkers out on a cold stormy day.

This was not ordinary networking but more of a meeting of like-minded entrepreneurs ready to share ideas, challenges and even heartbreak.

My share was finished and the women next to me, a wonderful artist, began to talk about the purity and beauty of the creative process.

My stomach started to knot.

She talked about that incredible moment when you are at one with the art, no person or place in mind, just you and your creation.

I sensed the tension rising and then realized that I actually felt a little angry.

She continued to tell us a story about a process she used to get herself into a meditative state in order to create the perfect piece.

I was furious.  And completely confused.  What was wrong?  Why was I so agitated?

I love working from a creative and peaceful, meditative state.  I adore that specific moment when you are in flow and the words just come tumbling out.  I have felt the power of channeling something magic, almost holy and when it all falls into place and it feels just right.

So why was I so frustrated and annoyed by her approach?

Well, here’s why.

I realized that there is such a thin line between creativity and self-indulgence.

I thought about how the outcome IS so important.

I imagined the scores and scores of coaches and healers that I’ve met who just love what they do and have no idea, whatsoever, how to describe it.  They can’t tell the story of the work and be clear about the transformation they support in their clients.

So that means they are really poor.  And often they can’t even afford to do what they love and have to get a job to support their ‘creativity habit’.  That infuriates me.

If this sounds familiar then I REALLY want you to listen up.

You can be super-creative, have a process and practice that creates the most amazing pieces of art, or words, or ideas….

But if you don’t have a client in mind, a clear issue that they need support on and the clarity around the result you can help them achieve….

Then you won’t have a business.

Creativity is not enough.

Brilliant ideas are not enough.

Being in the zone is not enough.

You need to serve.  You need to contribute.  You need to support someone else and make their life easier in the specific area of your expertise.

And you need to be able to talk about it.  To tell your story.  And to get them to pay you for it.

I’m not being insensitive here.  I’m not being unfeeling.

I’m being realistic.

I want you to be a huge success with your creativity.  I know you can be.  So go out there.  Connect with your clients. Tell your Story.  And you’ll be richer and wiser for it!
Share your thoughts below

 

Granted, it may sound a little odd, particularly from a sales person like me, in which case the following words may change the way you think about getting bad news.

You see, I’m a realist. We can always do our best; but nobody wins them all.

Bad news is great – But only when you get it early. Time is absolutely everything.

There seems to be somewhat of an obvious trend among sales people which tends to cause a lot of stress and unnecessary extra pressure at the end of the month.

FACT: We all put off things we don’t like doing.

For a lot of sales people it’s a confidence issue surrounding discussing key elements of a deal early enough or at all before asking for the order, which leads to inaccurate forecasting fuelled by avoiding asking the ‘tough’ questions.

By now you’re probably sick of me talking about qualification but this stuff is mission critical folks. You need to qualify Timing at the earliest reasonable point, whilst you have your customer engaged.

Why? It’s simple really. It’s the only way you can ensure your own expectations are realistic.

If you don’t, and the prospect doesn’t categorically tell you when they will place an order you’re going to forecast, your expectations are likely to be, well, something you’ve made up yourself. So they are most probably going to be wrong!

This means at the end of the month when you finally manage to speak again with a view to closing and you’re told it will be next week before they place the order, you’re left with a gaping hole in your target and no time to create more opportunities you could realistically expect to close in time.

What that means for us at TST is that it makes us extremely focused on devoting time to well the qualified opportunities that we know will close during the current month, and the rest of our time is spent proactively hunting new business opportunities that we can close in (x) timeframe in order to ensure we deliver our number.

It’s a disciplined yet extremely effective way to work.

We’ve talked before about how your objective should be the only important thing and for most of us in sales roles, this will often be our revenue target. So if you want to make serious money you need to work smart.

So how do you know when and where to focus your time?

Make sure you work good quality questions around timing and timescales into your repertoire. Asking ‘When will you place an order?’ and being told ‘should be this month’ is simply not good enough for you forecast that deal.

Remember to drill down three times where you can like the example below because we all know it’s too easy to just accept it when we get told what we want to hear on a regular basis.

1) When will you place an order?

2) Just so I understand what kind of process does that go through to get signed off?

3) Is there any risk of this slipping into next month?

Then just simply be smart with your time and focus your efforts on deals that will close this month. Prioritise. More importantly pick up the phone and start creating new opportunities before it’s too late!