by Julia Felton | Sep 25, 2016
There are seven secrets to entrepreneurial success that you must practice throughout your business life if you are to achieve maximum results. They have been taught and repeated in thousands of books and articles over the years, and I have summarised them here for you as they are such a great reminder of what to focus on.
1. Clarity: You must be absolutely clear on who you are and what you want. You need written goals and plans for every part of your life. As Zig Ziglar would say, you must become a “meaningful specific” rather than a “wandering generality.”
Begin with your values. What do you believe in and stand for? What is most important to you in life? What would you pay for, fight for, suffer for and die for? What do you really care about? Someone once wrote, “Until you know exactly what you would do if you only had one hour left to live, you are not prepared to live.”
What is your vision for yourself and your future? What is your vision for your family and your finances? What is your vision for your career and your company? Peter Drucker once wrote, “Even if you are starting your business on a kitchen table, you must have a vision of becoming a world leader in your field, or you will probably never be successful.”
What is your mission for your business? What is it that you want to accomplish for your customers? What is it that you want to do to improve the lives and work of the people you intend to serve with your products and services? You need a clear vision and an inspiring mission to motivate yourself and others to do the hard work necessary to achieve business success.
What is your purpose for your life and your business? Why do you get up in the morning? What is your reason for being? And here’s a great question: What do you really want to do with your life?
Finally, what are your goals? What do you want to accomplish in your financial life? What are your family goals? What are your health goals? What difference do you want to make in the lives of others? And here is the best question: What would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?
The greater clarity you have regarding each of these issues–values, vision, mission, purpose and goals–the greater the probability that you will accomplish something wonderful with your life.
2. Competence: To be truly successful and happy, you must be very good at what you do. You must resolve to join the top 10 percent in your field. You must make excellent performance of the business task your primary goal and then dedicate all your energies to doing quality work and offering quality products and services.
To be successful in business, according to Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . and Others Don’t, you must find a field that satisfies three requirements. First, it must be something for which you have a passion-something you really believe in and love to do. Second, it must be an area where you have the potential to be the best, to be better than 90 percent of the people in that field. Third, it must involve a product or service that can be profitable and enable you to achieve all your financial goals.
According to the Harvard Business School, the most valuable asset a company can develop is its reputation. Your reputation is defined as “how you are known to your customers.” And the most important reputation you can have revolves around the quality of the products and services you offer and the quality of the people who deliver those services and interact with those customers.
3. Constraints: Between you and your goal, whatever it is, there will always be a constraint or limiting factor. Your ability to identify the most important factor that determines the speed at which you achieve your business goals is essential to your success.
The 80/20 rule applies to constraints in your business. Fully 80 percent of the reasons that you are not achieving your goals as quickly as you want will be within yourself. Only 20 percent will be contained in external circumstances or people.
What are your constraints? What holds you back? What sets the speed at which you achieve your goals? And what one thing could you do immediately to begin alleviating your main constraint? This is often the key to rapid progress.
4. Creativity: The essence of successful business is innovation. This is the ability to find faster, better, cheaper, easier ways to produce and deliver your products and services.
Fortunately, almost everyone is a “potential genius.” You have more intelligence and ability than you could ever use. Your job is to unleash this creativity and focus it, like a laser beam, on removing obstacles, solving problems and achieving your goals.
The essence of creativity is contained in your ability to solve the inevitable problems and difficulties of business life. Colin Powell said, “Leadership is the ability to solve problems.” Success is the ability to solve problems. And remember: A goal unachieved is merely a problem unsolved.
The way of the successful entrepreneur is to focus on the solution rather than the problem. Focus on what is to be done rather than what has happened or who is to blame. Concentrate all your attention on finding a solution to any obstacle that is holding you back from the sales and profitability you desire. And the more you think about solutions, the more solutions you will think of. You will actually feel yourself getting smarter by focusing all your energies on what you can do to continually improve your situation.
5. Concentration: Your ability to concentrate single-mindedly on the most important thing and stay at it until it is complete is an essential prerequisite for success. No success is possible without the ability to practice sustained concentration on a single goal or task, in a single direction.
The simplest way to learn to concentrate is to make a list for each day before you begin. Then prioritize the list by putting the numbers 1 through 10 next to each item. Once you have determined your most important task, immediately begin to work on that task. Discipline yourself to continue working until that top task is 100 percent complete. When you make a habit of doing this–starting and completing your most important tasks each day–you will double or triple your productivity and put yourself solidly on the way to wealth.
6. Courage: Winston Churchill once wrote, “Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.” It takes tremendous courage to take the entrepreneurial risks necessary to become wealthy. In study after study, experts have concluded it is the courage to take the “first step” that makes all the difference. This is the courage to launch in the direction of your goals, with no guarantee of success. Most people lack this.
Once you have begun your entrepreneurial journey, you also need the courage to persist. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “All great successes are the triumph of persistence.”
The word entrepreneur means “one who undertakes the risks of a new venture in pursuit of profit.” Fully 90 percent of the population will never have sufficient courage to launch a new venture, to start a new business, to boldly go where no one has gone before. You need, first of all, the courage to begin, to move out of your comfort zone in the direction of your goals and dreams, even though you know you will experience many problems, difficulties and temporary failures along the way.
Second, you need the courage to endure, to hang in there, to persist in the face of all adversity until you finally win. When you develop these twin qualities–the ability to step out in faith and then to persist resolutely in the face of all difficulties–your success is guaranteed.
7. Continuous Action: Perhaps the most outwardly identifiable quality of a successful person is that he or she is in continuous motion. The entrepreneur is always trying new things and, if they don’t work, trying something else. It turns out that most entrepreneurs achieve their success in an area completely different from what they had initially expected. But because they continually reacted and responded constructively to change, trying new methods, abandoning activities that didn’t work, picking themselves up after every defeat and trying once more, they eventually won out.
Top people, especially entrepreneurs, seem to have these three qualities. First, they learn more things. Second, they try more things. Third, they persist longer than anyone else. The good news is that, because of the law of probabilities, if you learn more things, try more things and persist longer, you dramatically increase the probability that you will succeed greatly. If you launch toward your goal and resolve in advance to never give up, your success is virtually guaranteed.
The Ultimate Reward
Jim Rohn once said, “The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire in the first place.”
To have more, you must first be more. For you to set out on the way to wealth and become a self-made entrepreneurial millionaire, you will have to develop many qualities at a higher level than you ever have before. You will have to become an exceptional person. You will have to become more than you ever imagined possible for you.
To realize your full potential and achieve all your financial goals in your own business, you must develop the virtues of integrity, courage and persistence to a much higher level than you have up to now. You will have to practice the qualities of clarity, competence, creativity, concentration and continuous action until they are as natural to you as breathing. You will have to accept complete responsibility for your life and everything that happens to you, and especially for the way you think in every area.
When you develop these qualities and become a completely different person, you will eventually achieve all your goals in life, including financial success. The best part of becoming an extraordinary person is that, if something happens and you lose it all, it won’t really matter. Because you have become a different person, you will be able to make it all back again and more, far faster than the first time.
Welcome to The Way to Wealth. You are about to embark on a grand adventure that may last for the rest of your working lifetime. But if you have the courage to begin and the persistence to endure, nothing can hold you back from achieving all your goals and dreams. If you decide that, no matter what, you will never give up, you will eventually become unstoppable.
(Adapted from an article by Brian Tracy)
by Julia Felton | Sep 21, 2016
During the last few years I have never ceased to be amazed by the power of the collective to achieve amazing results. It is one of the reasons that I always encourage my clients to find a team of people to support them as they grow their business.
All too often when we start off in business we fail to engage the support of others as often we feel it is too expensive and the business can’t afford it. The real truth is that you can’t afford not to have a team around you. Each team member provides a different perspective and these different opinions can help elevate the business to a different level than the business owner can achieve by themselves.
Yesterday I spent a day with three colleagues preparing for an international event we are delivering for a global client in early October. We are achieving a first as we are delivering a UK version of the Teaching Horse programme simultaneously in Amsterdam and North Carolina, USA.
There are some unique features of the Teaching Horse methodology so we decided to to have a practice day to ensure that we were all on the same page. What was amazing was that each of us brought our unique interpretation to the approach, but by discussing and collectively practicing the exercises we were able to create a streamlined approach that flowed much better than each of us could achieve individually.
That is the power of the collective intelligence and why I am also an advocate of Mastermind groups and working in teams. You can read about the power of Mastermind groups here.
Interestingly, in nature lots of activities occur in collective groups. Just take a herd of horses. They live as a collective as this helps keep everyone safe. Geese fly in formation, lions hunt as a team. There are examples every where how of the power of collective achieves disproportional results. Definitely a case of 1+1=3.
So how can you leverage the power of the collective to achieve amazing results? I’d love to hear from you about what you going to do.
by Julia Felton | Sep 14, 2016
What choices are you making about your life? Are you seeing life as wealth of opportunities or are you just seeing the challenges that lie ahead? Are you a glass half full or half empty kind of person?
I’ve just spent last weekend at Roger Hamilton’s Fast Forward Your Business event where we were looking at the top ten trends that will be shaping business over the next few years. As a Wealth Dynamics Creator, Roger is definitely always looking at the opportunities in business. It was so insightful to really get to grips with all the trends that will be impacting business and how technology will be changing our world and how we do business.
Potentially, one of the most challenging aspects for business owners, that Roger shared, is comprehending the speed of change. It is estimated that the speed of change in the next four years will be greater than than the speed of change in the last 20 years.
It was just 20 years ago the internet started to be used at work and team members started using email at work. Mobile phones hadn’t been around long and portable computers (what we affectionately called lugables!!) were just emerging, but were really cumbersome and heavy. So much has changed in the last 20 years and if this change is exponential over the next four then the world and business landscape will become unrecognisable.
Five years ago at the first Fast Forward Your Business Event I remember Roger sharing about the future trend of 3-d printing. At that time I recall thinking that it was never possible and yet today 3-d printers are being used to create houses and even limbs. The first 3-d house has been printed in China and 3-d printing is changing the way we do business and as a result making products more accessible.
Much of what I heard at that first event I thought was impossible and just pie in sky and yet much of it is now reality. Think electric cars and solar cities. In April Elon Musk launched the Model 3 electric car and in one day secured 180,000 pre-orders worth USD$7.5 billion. Not bad for one day at the office!!!
The simple fact is that entrepreneurs like Elon Musk don’t see things as being impossible but rather they look at what is possible and see the opportunities all around them. A simple apostrophe is the difference been Impossible and I’m Possible. In business we can choose to see the challenges or we can harness the opportunities and ride the waves of success.
What choice will you make today in how you approach your business and life?
by Julia Felton | Sep 11, 2016
In my last blog I spoke about the Power of Masterminding, now I want to focus on 10 powerful reasons to join a Mastermind group.
Success in business relies on us being able to lead ourselves and become the leader of our business. In order to do that we need to master being more focused. And stop the Entrepreneurial ADD activities that plague many business owners. And to channel our ideas, turn them into action. After all action is the key to success.
One of the best ways I have discovered to do this is to assemble a virtual board of directors for your business, consisting of inspirational people like yourself who can offer advice, help you set goals and feed back on your achievements. A mastermind group is one way to achieve this as it provides you with a different perspective on any business challenges and also provides accountability and support.
Here are 10 other reasons to join a mastermind group.
- You’re no longer alone. One of the major banes of being a business owner, especially a solo-preneur is working in isolation. At times this is a glorious way to operate, at others it can be immensely frustrating. So having someone to chat over your thoughts and hopes with – and more importantly, get valuable insight into things that may or may not be good for you – is gold dust. The Mastermind Group alleviates the Lone Ranger syndrome that I so often find in business.
- You have a reason to excel. There’s no more potent motivation than having other people rooting for you, checking your progress and importantly holding you accountable for your results. Create your strategy and goals and then ask for some feedback from the other Mastermind members. They will give you an incredible different perspective on the situation and will be there to support you in achieving them because at every meeting they will want to hear your progress. There’s no greater motivator than that.
- It’s an excuse to mine minds. Assembling a group of like minded people in the same place at the same time means you can genuinely indulge in a form of cerebral exercise that you just can’t get anywhere else. Think about it – up to 12 people, each hugely driven to make waves in the world through their respective ventures, capturing ideas and forming plans. Collaborating on the future. Collaboration – it’s the only way to do business today.And there’s no excuse not to, because with Mastermind Groups you can meet up…
- Anytime, anywhere. It’s motivating enough to tease us out of our comfort zones, so we make the effort. Technology and connectivity means your Mastermind Group can span different countries not just industries. You don’t just have to stay in your back yard any more. I used to be in a Mastermind Group which contained people from afar as LA and Sydney. Now co-ordinating a suitable time of day to connect at could be a challenge but the value of the diverse perspectives that I got was awesome.
- Develop your listening ear. We all love to talk about our business success but you’ll only grow when you hear what’s happening elsewhere. We have two ears, one mouth – use them in that ratio. Being in the company of inspirational people will help you understand the gravitas of that statement as you learn that listeningis the most powerful art of all.
- The value is priceless. A well constructed Mastermind group can help propel the success of your business beyond measure. Just imagine the power of having 12 people who genuinely care about your business success guiding you and giving you tough honest feedback. People who say what needs to be said, who challenge and maybe event irk you, but who say it like it is. After all “nice” didn’t serve anyone and I would rather get some tough honest feedback than have others agree 100% with what I say, how does that serve me?
- It works. Mastermind groups will change the way you do business, using tested and proven principles. Napoleon Hill kicked it all off with his idea of a virtual board derived from the research he conducted and documented in Think and Grow Rich. Its success relies on the power of the collective mind and that fact that 1+1 = 3. Gaining all these different perspectives on a situation results in you coming up with results that are greater than the sum of the parts.
- It’s Zen for Business. You give, you get back. This is the law of reciprocity and nothing feels better in the world than helping someone else. You can’t fail to raise an inner smile when you find your advice is making a difference to someone else’s life.
- Set your own agenda for change. The great thing about a Mastermind group is that the group sets the agenda and the facilitator does simply that. Just facilitates what needs to happen to ensure that all participants get an opportunity to show up in the hot seat and get feedback on their most pressing business challenge.
- It’s all about you. It’s about your success. Within a great structured group everyone has everyone’s interests at heart. You just can’t get the same level of focus on your business, anywhere else.
I’ve been sold on Mastermind groups since I participated in my first one back in 2009, and since then they have been an integral part of my business success. That is why I am excited to be launching the Into The Winners Circle Mastermind Group for 12 ambitious women who are sick and tired of trying to do it all themselves and who want to surround themselves with a group of other inspiring women and collaborate their way to success. Details are just being finalised so email me if you want to be on the priority notifications list.
by Julia Felton | Sep 7, 2016
There is a power in simplicity. The easier something is to understand, the easier it is to share it. And the easier your message is to share the more people you can impact. Wow. Although I’ve known this for a long time this statement really hit me hard this week as I begun to realize how complex I have made my business and my life.
And it’s important to realize that in the words of Steve Jobs: “Simple can be harder than complex”. Sometimes trying to articulate what we do in a simple statement can be so challenging to do. We have a natural tendency to want to tell everyone all the things that we can do to help them, and yet when we do that we make our elevator pitch (short description of what services you offer) complex and no-one understands anything. Ironically, we can then end up serving no-one as people just don’t understand what ours specialism is.
I know I run a limiting belief that if something is too easy it’s not worth doing! What’s that all about?. Why do I insist on making things complex?. Can you relate to that?. I know it comes from my parents who were all about making things complicated and yet when things are complex it is difficult to flow.
Just think about a river. It flows easiest when there are no rocks or boulders in the way. The flow of the river is effortless and no resources are wasted. Contrast that with a river full of debris and rocks. The river flows more slowly as it navigates the hazards in its way. That’s the difference between the power of simplicity and the challenge of complexity and it provides a great metaphor that is for life and business.
Now please don’t confuse simplicity with easiness. As Steve Jobs noted: “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple”. Yes making something complex simple is really challenging. That’s a bit of a twist!. It tests us to ensure that we really understand what we are talking about and that we can distill it into understandable, manageable chunks. This is why the best courses and training create step by step systems to help you learn. They simplify the process and engage all our sensory systems in the learning process to maximize results.
I know when I am designing my training programmes I often hold the vision of could I explain this to a 5 year old. Because if I can’t then I haven’t simplified the process enough. Albert Einstein also recognized the power of simplicity when he said: “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.
Often a great way to get to learn something is to challenge yourself to explain it to someone else. If they don’t get it you gain valuable feedback on what you need to do to make your message clearer. Networking events provide a great arena to try this out in. Draft your elevator pitch and share it with others. Do they get it great, but if other people still don’t know what you do, then you’ve got valuable feedback to work on.
I’ll never forget a story that one of my mentors shared with me. She crafted what she thought was an excellent elevator pitch yet when she went and met potential clients they didn’t understand what she did. It tuned out that whilst the sentence made sense on paper the words she used simply did not resonate with her target clients. They even thought she did something different! This awesome feedback allowed her to refine her message and craft it using different language that resonated with her audience.
So my challenge to you this week is how can you simplify your life and business so others can better understand it.? Share your ideas with us in the facebook group.
by Julia Felton | Sep 4, 2016
The power of the masterminding can be summed up as “The co-ordination of knowledge and effort of two or more people who work together towards a definite purpose, in the spirit of harmony.”
Masterminding groups have been around since the beginning of humankind. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and the Greeks all used the same concept but it was not until 1937 that Andrew
Carnegie, then the richest man in the world, commissioned Napoleon Hill to identify the traits of successful businessmen. His conclusions documented in “Think and Grow Rich” revealed that
all had similar thoughts feelings and actions that led to success. Hill also noted that: “No individual may have great power without availing himself of the Master Mind” as “No two minds ever come together without creating a third, invisible mind that moves members to new heights”
In its simplest form masterminding is two people discussing how to solve a problem. Each person has their own ideas, as we all think in different ways, so by combining ideas through brainstorming one person can take another’s idea and give it a slight twist to create a new insight and in turn that can create a new concept. These thoughts would not have existed if they hadn’t been created by the Third Mind in the conversation.
Why Mastermind?
In a mastermind group the agenda belongs to the group and each person’s participation and commitment is key. You will get out what you put in and gain tremendous insights which will improve
your business and personal life. Your mastermind group is like having an objective board of directors, a success team, and a peer advisory group all rolled into one. So if you:
- Feel your business is stuck in a rut
- Lack inspiration to do something new
- Are struggling from lone ranger mentality
- Need an accountability structure
- Want to collaborate with like minded people
then become part of a Mastermind Group where you can learn skills, techniques and get advice to help you get your business moving to the next level
Ever wonder what makes one person successful and one not. It’s not education or hard work. The difference lies in what each person knows and how they use that knowledge and take action
consistently and persistently to improve the business.
Benefits of Being Part of a Mastermind
Key Benefits of participating in a Mastermind Group include:
- Increase your own experience and confidence
- Sharpen your business and personal skills
- Create real progress in your business and your life
- Get honest feedback, advice and brainstorming
- Borrow on the experience and skills of other members
- Create action plans and have the group hold your accountable for fulfilling your plans and goals
- Receive critical insights into yourself
- Optimistic peer support in maintaining a positive mental attitude
- A sense of shared endeavor—there are others out there
I’ve been fortunate to be a part of a number of different mastermind groups over the years and I’ve always found them a very powerful way to help me grow my business. I love the collaborative nature of the group and how when I’m part of a mastermind I no longer feel alone in my business. I feel and know that I have others around me who want my success as much as I do. This supportive environment is very energizing. That’s why shortly I will be launching the Into The Winners Circle Mastermind Group. Its for ambitious women business owners who are sick and tired of doing it by themselves and want to be inspired and supported each and every month by other women who get where they are and who can provide insightful solutions to any challenges you might be experiencing. Plus we’ll be adding a little HorsePower into the mix to really give your business the kick start it deserves.
Just email me to get on the priority notification list so that you get all the details as soon as they are available.
by Julia Felton | Aug 31, 2016
Are you looking at the results in your business? I mean really tracking, monitoring and analyzing the results. Do you know which are your best performing product lines? Who are your most profitable customers? Which activities are not producing a return on investment?
For many of you I know tracking and analyzing the performance of your business is not high on the list of things to do. After all it’s a Steel activity and many entrepreneurs that I know are not big in this energy frequency. (You can learn more about the different energy frequencies and take your Talent Dynamics assessment here).
And the thing is that when an activity is not in your primary frequency there is the danger that you will procrastinate and not attend to it, as it is an activity that is out of flow. I get that as I have low Steel in my profile. However, this is not an excuse for not focusing on the numbers.
The numbers in your business are a great indicator of how successful your business is being. They can tell you where the blind spots are in your business. Where your current systems and processes aren’t working optimally and are not Joined Up. They can tell you if you are on track and where any discrepancies are. And yet many of us prefer to ignore these signs and stick our head in the sand. If we don’t look at the numbers then we won’t have to fully acknowledge how well or poor or business is performing.
I get it. I was guilty of this for a long time. I had a lovely business plan. I knew where I was going and what I wanted the business to achieve, so surely it would all happen. Incorrect. When I actually stopped and really looked at my business numbers I had to face the harsh reality that the business model I was using was fundamentally flawed. With all my travel and accommodation costs my workshops were barely breaking even, so although I was making some decent revenue my business was not profitable and I was suffering from a real cash flow issue.
That was a wake up call. This is why I love helping clients create their Strategy on a Page. It gives you a blueprint of where you want your business to go. We map out in detail not only the purpose and values of the business but also the business growth metrics for the five key business pillars of marketing, sales, operations, finance and talent. So not only do you have a beautiful strategy but you also have clear milestones of what you need to achieve. Then each month I hold you accountable to reporting on how your business is performing against the plan. This forces you to really examine the results and to identify any changes that need to take place in order to help you reach your goal.
Adopting this strategy changed my business and I know it can for you too, that’s why I’m offering a number of Unleash Your Profit Potential Strategy Sessions to get you started. During this session you will discover:
- Hidden opportunities to make more income in your business
- How your might be sabotaging your business success and break through these limitations
- How to create a clear plan that takes you from where you are to where you want to be.
Simply complete this short application form so I know something about you and your business and then I’ll contact you and get an appointment scheduled in the diary.
I so look forward to connecting with you, learning more about your business and helping you get focused on the results in your business.
by Julia Felton | Aug 24, 2016
Are you living a life of no regrets? No seriously, are you. What do you have on your bucket list of things to do that you’ve been putting off either because of lack of time and/or resources? Maybe it’s a business idea that you haven’t pursued to its natural conclusion, maybe it’s a location you want to travel to or maybe it’s a hobby you haven’t taken up yet. All too often in life we put off things saying I’ll do that when I’m older, have more money etc and yet what happens if this time never arrives. I don’t want to go out of this world wishing there were things I had done, but failed to do because of fear, lack of resources or my failure to take action.
The phrase a life of no regrets is something I’ve coined from a mentor of mine Deri Llewellyn-Davies (aka The Strategy Man). Deri was inspired to live a life of no regrets after listening to the parting words of his father. Since that time Deri has been an adventurous daredevil climbing many of the words highest mountains. He was even on Mount Everest when the earthquake struck last year. You can listen to his incredible story in his TedEx talk F*** the Fear.
This year my own mortality has been brought sharply into focus as I’ve lost two good friends (very unexpectedly) and as my mum goes through cancer treatment again. My good friend Jacqs who terribly passed away after a car crash last weekend certainly lived life to the full. She was always the life and soul of the party and designed her life the way she wanted to – she lived life on her terms. I first met Jacqs when I was working at Andersen and she offered me a refuge when I split with my boyfriend. We had a wild time living together in London as she knew how to have fun. And it is Jacqs that I have to thank for my current business and lifestyle as she persuaded me to go on a ranching holiday with her back in 2000 and that re-ignited my passion for horses and then the eventual purchase of Toby my first horse.
Jacqs was committed to designing and living her life her way. After our time wrangling as cowgirls in Wyoming she decided she wanted to go and live in the US. Within a year she had managed to get her employer Deutsche Bank to transfer her to their New York office and she moved there just after 9/11. I’ll fondly remember that Christmas sitting in her New York apartment surrounded by packing boxes.
Then she decided she wanted to live in Montana. So blow me down that is what she does. She buys a property there and then persuades Deutsche Bank she can work remotely and in the process she gets promoted to Deutsche Bank’s Global Head of Supervisory Analysts. On paper you would never have imagined such a global firm would allow such a senior position to work remotely, let alone in Montana, and yet that is what happened. If she had allowed her logical brain to determine what was possible she might never had tried to make her dream come true. But Jacqs was resilient, steely, determined and tenacious and never had any doubt that this outcome was possible.
So what restrictions are you putting on your life? Where are you holding back and not doing what you want because you think it’s not possible. Jacqs is an example to us all that if you really desire something you can achieve it, however impossible it might initially seem.
Go forth and be the designer of your own life and share in the Facebook group what you want you life to be like, so that we can all support you on your journey.
by Julia Felton | Aug 17, 2016
Have you ever considered that your success is determined by the attitude of the people you spend the most time with? Just think about that for a moment. If you surround yourself with successful positive people it stands to reason that you too will gravitate to their level.
We have witnessed this phenomenon during the Olympics and none more so than on Sensational Sunday, when the UK won 5 gold medals. The best result for the team in any Olympics held abroad. What is even more amazing about the feat is that two of the gold medals occurred in gymnastics, a sport that the UK has never won a gold medal in before.
Over the last decade, led by Louis Smith, the sport has grown in popularity and attracted new talent in the shape of Max Whitlock – who went on to win two gold medals. Part of Whitlock’s success is in no small part to the trailblazing that Louis did for the sport and the fact that he won a silver medal in the 2012 Olympics and a bronze in the Beijing Olympics.
We’ve also witnessed similar success in the Velodrome where the success of an initial handful of riders has rubbed off on the team and at the time of writing this the UK has secured 4 gold medals and 3 silver medals in the cycling events. An incredible feat again considering that two decades ago the sport was barely visible in the UK.
I experienced my own mini-version of how surrounding yourself with successful people helps you up your game and become more successful when I was out running on Sunday. At one point during my run a lady overtook me as I was coming down the hill near my house. She then proceeded to run past me continuing on the same track that I was planning on following. There was something about following her (or was I chasing her!) that helped me up my game and go much faster than usual. The result was that I covered the longest distance I have ever done in 30 mins and not surprisingly in the fastest time.
Personally I was really amazed at the impact that her presence had had on me and how it had helped me improve my performance beyond what I thought I was capable of. And that’s the power of surrounding yourself with people more successful than you. They can help you achieve levels that you may have previously thought were impossible. They encourage you to reach for the stars and be your best as they model what is possible.
So who are you surrounding yourself with? Are they people that will help propel you and your business to the next level, or are they folks who are doubting you, putting you down and quashing your dreams.? Recognising this is the first step in helping you change your environment to one that is more positive and supportive to your growth.
I really look forward to hearing about what changes you make as a result of reading this weeks Wednesday Wisdom.
by Julia Felton | Aug 14, 2016
Joined Up Business Leaders are disciplined to ensure that they never waste any resources – time, energy or money. They recognise that when they are disciplined and do what they said they would do, everything in life flows more easily.
Discipline comes from being committed to an activity and seeing it through to the end, no matter what. Far too many people say they are committed to something but when push comes to shove they quit. So why is this? Quite simply whilst they were just interested in achieving something rather than being committed to its success..
Here are three simple actions that you can practice every day to ensure that you stay disciplined and use your resources wisely.
1. Run the day, or it will run you. Some people will be masters of their time, and others will be servants. Joined Up Business Leaders become the masters of their time.
To master your time, you must have clear written goals for each day that you keep with you at all times. It helps to create each day’s list the night before. Prioritize your goals for the day and constantly review them. Enterprising people don’t let the minor activities distract them from the major activities—the ones that hold the keys to their success. Joined Up Leaders are disciplined in how they approach their day and remain pro-active rather than re-active to daily events.
2. Don’t mistake activity for productivity. You probably know some people who always seem to be busy being busy. To be successful, you must be busy being productive. Some people are going, going, going, but they’re not making much progress. Don’t mistake activity for productivity, movement for achievement. Evaluate the hours in your days and see if there is wasted time that you could manage better. You can read more about being a busy fool here.
One of my favourite exercises is to track what you do everyday for a week. I tracked my activities by the hour but you could do it in 15 mins or 30 mins increments. List all the activities that you do during the day, including eating, exercising, sleeping etc. Then at the end of a week calculate how many hours you have spent doing each activity. I was shocked by how much time I was spending on social media and researching what my peers were doing. No wonder time seemed to be slipping past each day. I was in busyness but not really being productive.
3. Focus. The third key is good concentration. You’ve got to zero in on the job at hand and let nothing stand in your way and distract you from the task. It is also important to focus on your highest producing activities first. High income producing activities are those that will immediately yield you income and typically involve connecting with potential clients and prospects. There is no better use of your time than to be investing in activities that leverage your time.
Another way to stay focused is to set a timer and give yourself say 50 mins to complete the task. During this 50 min time make sure that you turn off your phone, email notifications and stop all distractions. There is something very motivating about knowing that you just have a finite amount of time to complete the task at hand. Then at the end of 50 mins you can take a break, re-focus and then start again. I’ve found this strategy to be really successful in helping me get things done.
I’d love to hear what strategies you are using to stay focused so that you can remain disciplined and boost your profits.
