Category: Success Attitude

What happens when we set our sights on something magnificent?

It may seem unlikely but it is our true nature. It may seem ridiculous but it is our heart’s purpose.

It may be entirely unsupported.

This wonderful story by Arnold Lobel came to my mind. I want to share it.

The Camel had her heart set on becoming a ballet dancer.

“To make every movement a thing of grace and beauty”, said the Camel. “That is my one and only desire.”

Again and again she practiced her pirouettes, her releves and her arabesques. She repeated the five basic positions a hundred times each day. She worked for long months under the hot desert sun. Her feet were blistered and her body ached, but not once did she think of stopping.

At last the Camel said, “Now I am a dancer.” She announced a recital and danced before an invited group of camel friends and critics. When her dance was over, she made a deep bow.

There was no applause.

“I must tell you frankly,” said a member of the audience, “as a critic and a spokesman for this group, that you are lumpy and humpy. You are baggy and bumpy. You are, like the rest of us, simply a camel. You are NOT and never will be a ballet dancer!”

Chuckling and laughing the audience moved away across the sand.

“How very wrong they are!” said the Camel. “I have worked hard. There can be no doubt that I am a splendid dancer. I will dance and dance just for myself.”

That is what she did. It gave her many years of pleasure.

Are you showing up with your heart and soul following the path of your true nature?

Article Contributed by Dr. Joey Faucette

What do you believe about your business?

Your business beliefs are the core values of your “how” in leading your relationships and managing the details. Have you ever taken four minutes and written them down?

Make sure you include these three things you gotta believe about your business:

Business Pace

When my daughter ran distance races, she trained her body to build endurance by putting in the necessary miles daily. She also exercised her mind to learn course management.

She discovered in her first races that adrenaline would push her out hard and fast from the start and carry her for a while. If she kept up that pace, she often led, but when she approached the finish, she had no energy left and fell way back. The only result that counts is when you cross the finish line.

She discovered how to pace herself, starting strong, settling into a comfortable, economical pace, with enough reserve for a powerful finish kick. Such a pace allowed her to compete and succeed.

Your business has a pace. Adjusting your intensity to reflect it is a key to Work Positive success. You run sprints one way. Maybe that’s your 4Q. You run 5K’s an entirely different way. That might be your 1Q.

You gotta believe that your business has a pace and rhythm all its own. Adjust your intensity accordingly and train for it.

Balance People and Tasks

You can focus your business efforts on people—employees, vendors, and customers—but when you do, you lose sight of your company goals.

You can focus your energy on accomplishing tasks—your goals and action plan—but when you do, you forget that its people who accomplish those tasks.

My grandmother gave me a chocolate bunny every spring for Easter. Some years, I bit into it to find only air inside. Other years, it was marshmallow. My favorite years were those when I discovered chocolate through and through.

Balancing people and tasks means you lead your business consistently—through and through. You lead people to accomplish tasks and focus on tasks for people to achieve.

You gotta believe that your business succeeds when you balance people and tasks.

Beyond the Obvious

You’re staring at your P&L and balance sheets for 2011 about now. What do you believe happened in 2011 in your business?

A pair of sisters enjoyed shopping in a Goodwill shop in Virginia. One of them saw a pearl necklace, found it attractive, and since it was only $.69, bought it, believing that it was just costume jewelry.

Wearing it back home in Arizona, a friend commented on how beautiful it was and encouraged her to get it appraised. She did and discovered that it was worth a little more than the $.69 purchase price.

Like $50,000 more.

As you look back on 2011 and forward into 2012, you gotta believe beyond the obvious. Believe that at least some of your investments in adjusting your business pace will pay off this year. Believe that by balancing people and tasks you will discover unimagined value.

You gotta believe in your business in 2012!

About the Author:

Best-selling author, speaker, and coach Dr. Joey Faucette shares how all of us working together create a more positive world this week. Adapted from his #1 Amazon best-seller, Work Positive in a Negative World.

Article Contributed by Dr. Joey Faucette

At times we allow the negative noise of the flat economy to drown out any positive, on-key music in our businesses. Soon the negative noise has an effect on you. You become filled with:

• Fears about finances—“The bank called. Surely they’re not calling in my note.”
• Suspicions about an employee—“He sure talks about our competition a lot.”
• Mistrust of a vendor—“She says she’s doing me a special favor with this contract, but…”

What’s a business owner to do?

One cold winter’s night, I was sitting in my favorite recliner at home, trying to have a conversation with my wife. She was seated in the chair next to me with only a lamp table between us.

Suddenly I realized that I was yelling to be heard. I listened around the room for a moment and discovered why. First, the TV was on, blaring through our speaker system. It had to be on loud enough to be heard over the fan that was blowing hot air from the gas logs. Because the gas logs were on and dry out the air, we were running a humidifier with its fan blowing. Throw in a couple of daughters talking, and it’s no wonder I was yelling.

So I got up out of my recliner and turned off the humidifier, turned back the fan blowing hot air from the gas logs, turned down the TV, and said, “Shhh” to our daughters. Then I sat back down, smiled at my wife, and said, “There, that’s better. Where were we?”

You can do the same with regard to your business.

First, identify the negative noises. Do what I did—analyze the room. Pick out the negative noises. What are they—news reports? An employee? A friend? You’ll know them when you hear them. Pay attention to your own irritability, or nausea, or headaches, or negative attitude that increases after you’re exposed to them.

Second, cut them down or off. Just like I did, you’ll have to get up from where you are and move towards where you want to be. You can choose to turn off the morning TV news—push media—and instead go online and select only those stories you choose to read or watch—pull media. You can confront your employee about that negative attitude. You can limit your exposure to your sky-is-falling friend. Get up and cut them off.

Third, focus on the positive. I returned to my recliner and my conversation with my wife. I chose to listen to her instead of the noise. Pick one positive dynamic in your business and listen to it. A customer’s testimonial letter. An employee’s thank you. A positive third quarter. Fix your thoughts on these on-key musical selections instead of the negativity that a flat economy sings.

Choose these three ways to make your business sing on-key despite the flat economy and watch your profits crescendo!

About the Author

Dr. Joey Faucette is an international speaker, business coach, and best-selling author of the #1 Amazon business book, Work Positive in a Negative World: Redefine Your Reality and Achieve Your Business Dreams. He has taught business professionals this life-transforming process for over two decades, leading individuals in organizations of every size to achieve amazing results. He is the founder of Listen to Life, a company that coaches people to redefine their reality and fulfill their business dreams. He is the host of the syndicated radio show, Listen to Life. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org, connect with him on LinkedIn, follow him on Twitter @DrJoey, and become a Facebook fan at Work Positive.

Article by Jeff Beals

“Great moments are born from great opportunities,” said the late Herb Brooks, one of the world’s most famous hockey coaches.

Brooks certainly seized opportunity during his career.  He agreed to coach the 1980 U.S. Olympic team that beat the “unbeatable” Soviet Union in Lake Placid, New York during the famous “Miracle on Ice” game on the way to winning the gold medal.  It was a modern-day “David vs. Goliath” matchup. Many coaches would refuse such an overwhelmingly difficult job.  In fact, several did.

But Brooks saw opportunity in the monumental challenge of leading a bunch of young, amateur, college all-stars against the essentially professional players of the Soviet Union and other European hockey powers.

That opportunity paid off, to say the least.

Whether you’re talking about sports, business or any other subject matter, seeking, finding and capitalizing on opportunity are among the most important things a professional must do.

There’s one big problem with opportunity, however.  It is often hard to find and even harder to harness.

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations,” said Charles Swindoll, an American religious author.

I agree wholeheartedly with Swindoll’s characterization.  The best opportunities are often hidden.  They are often located in places we least expect to find them and are presented by people we least expect to provide them.

That reminds me of the old story that sales managers like to share with their young trainees: “On his way back from a three-day fishing trip, a multi-millionaire visits the showroom of an upscale, luxury car dealer.  The salespersons, seeing an unshaven, disheveled, poorly dressed man, essentially ignore him.  Offended, the multi-millionaire buys a top-of-the-line model the next day from a direct competitor.”  There are a lot of ways to tell that classic missed-sales-opportunity story, but they all sound something like that.

If opportunity is so important to our success, and so difficult to find and recognize, we need to focus more of our energy on it.  Unless you’re naturally good at it, finding and capitalizing on opportunity needs to be a deliberate focus:

Open your eyes and ears – we can no longer afford to be indifferent, or even worse, oblivious to the world around us.  Be on the lookout for ideas that could lead to new opportunities.  Even more important than eyes and ears, keep your mind open too.  Many of us miss opportunities, because they don’t fit into our pre-existing paradigms.

Remember that all people count – sometimes we get so obsessed with the “right” people, we miss out on valuable opportunities from people, who on the surface, can do seemingly nothing for us.

Fight through the fear – one of the biggest reasons we miss out on extraordinary opportunities is because we are too afraid to leap.  Herb Brooks wasn’t too afraid to leap; we shouldn’t be either.

Let your creative juices flow – the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Albert Szent-Gyorgi once said, “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”  The more creative you are, the more opportunity you will discover.  See the world in a different way, and doing things like nobody else, and just watch the opportunities that manifest.

Take risks – As the old saying goes, “nothing risked, nothing gained.”  Unless you take a chance and do something new, you’ll keep running into the same old opportunities.

Work really hard – “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work,” said the great inventor Thomas Edison.

Set meaningful goals – make those goals specific too.  The more you clarify what you really want, the quicker you will recognize it when it shows up.

Find quiet time – many people have found great opportunities, because they prayed for them or spent time meditating about them.  Such activity creates focus in your mind, and a focused mind is a powerful mind.

Believe – visualize success and tell yourself that good things will come.  A positive mind is more receptive to hidden opportunity.

Prepare – as the old Boy Scout motto says, “be prepared.”  You never know when the perfect opportunity will open up.  If you’re not prepared, you might not act on it quickly enough.  In his autobiography, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he believes in “relentless preparation.”  He constantly prepares for crisis, so he will perform properly.  Same thing applies to opportunity.

About the Author:   

Jeff Beals is an award-winning author, who helps professionals do more business and have a greater impact on the world through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques. As a professional speaker, he delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide. You can learn more and follow his “Business Motivation Blog” at JeffBeals.com.