Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts

Is it time for you to stop setting goals?

Posted: Tuesday, December 9, 2014 by Unknown in Labels: , , , , ,
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I was talking with a partner this morning and he asked me: "What goals are you shooting for next year?" He went silent when I said; "I am not setting goals for next year. I didn't set any this year, and it was a record year for us... so I am skipping setting goals for next year as well." He was shocked, but then I explained to him my thought process...

We all have things that we want to achieve in our lives — getting into the better shape, building a successful business, raising a wonderful family, improving our financial situation, and so on. For most of us, the path to those things starts by setting a specific and actionable goal. I have taught people this process for years and this is how I approached my life until recently. I would set yearly goals for my health, my finances, my business, and my life. Setting goals has been a huge part of my life for over 25 years... But the results have been mixed.

Today, what I’m starting to realize is that when it comes to actually getting things done and making progress in the areas that are important to you, there is a much better way to do things. It all comes down to the difference between your goals and your system.

What’s the difference between your goals and your system?
If you’re a coach, your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day.
If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.
If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales, marketing, and training process.

Now for the really interesting question… If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still get results? 
You know you would!  My friend Randy Schroeder says this; “DDDDBC – Daily disciplines done daily build character.” And they do… but they also build businesses, finances, better health and so on.

There are two more reasons why you should focus on systems instead of goals.
1. Goals reduce your current happiness.
When you’re working toward a goal, you are essentially saying, “I’m not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goal.” The problem with this mindset is that you’re teaching yourself to always put happiness and success off until the next milestone is achieved. “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy. Once I achieve my goal, then I’ll be successful.”
SOLUTION: Commit to a process, not just a goal.
You can keep things simple and reduce stress by focusing on the daily process and sticking to your schedule, rather than worrying about the big, life-changing goals. When I started my business years ago I set goals to hit three separate levels by certain dates. I missed my first one by three months, the second by six months, and the third by two and a half years. Needless to say I was unhappy and frustrated. However, I found it much easier to focus on the daily disciplines I could control (how many phone calls, presentations, etc. ) The key to our success in network marketing has nothing to do with the ranks we have hit, it's all in our "system." We have simply averaged 15+ presentations a month for over 25 years. When you focus on the practice instead of the performance, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time.

2. Goals are strangely at odds with long-term progress.
You might think your goal will keep you motivated over the long-term, but that’s not always true. Consider someone who sets a goal to lose 30 pounds. Many people will work hard for months, but as soon as they hit that goal, they stop training. Their goal was to lose the weight and now that they have completed it, that goal is no longer there to motivate them. This can create a type of “yo-yo effect” where people go back and forth from working on a goal to not working on one. This type of cycle makes it difficult to build upon your progress for the long-term.
SOLUTION: Release the need for immediate results.
When you set a goal and you don’t reach it, you often feel like a failure. But with a systems-based mentality, it’s much easier to carry on. Systems-based thinking is never about hitting a particular number, it’s about sticking to the process and not backing off of your efforts.

None of this is to say that goals are useless. However, I've found that goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress.
Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short-term, but eventually a well-designed system will always win.
Having a system is what matters. Committing to the process is what makes all the difference!

You've got this!
LWS


Excerpts via@ Scott Adams & James Clear

No Man's Land.

Posted: Wednesday, September 17, 2014 by Unknown in Labels: , , , , , ,
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Tennis is a great game. It teaches players a lot about temperament and psychological tendencies. Tennis is one of those games where you must play the ball, not the opponent. If you take care of the ball, take care of your shot, you force your opponent to take care of his business also. 

Court position is a vital part of a player's strategy and ability to execute effective shots. In tennis, the phrase "No Man's Land or The Dead Zone" refers to the area of the tennis court where a player doesn't want to be trading shots. This area is where half volleys land at your feet, shots go into your body and too much open court is exposed for angled passing shots. Good players spend almost no time here. They may return a short ball from no man’s land but will return to the baseline or take the net. No man’s land is where mediocre players go to die.

No man’s land is not just a tennis issue. "No Man's Land" can be a metaphor for nearly every aspect of a life. No man’s land is any place where you are unfocused, uncommitted, waffling, or have an unclear vision of what to do or where you are going... And guaranteed, you will get chewed up. No man’s land is where mediocre entrepreneurs go to die.

If you are going to be successful at anything, at some point you must decide whether you’re in or you’re out. It’s that simple! No more stories, no more sidestepping, no more excuses, escape hatches, or half efforts. You’re either in, or you’re out. You are either going to do it or you're not!

Learn from others that are successful, make your venture a priority, pay the price and never give up!

LWS

#success

Should I stay or should I go?

Posted: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 by Unknown in Labels: , , , , , ,
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Should I stay or should I go?

This is not only a song from one of my favorite 80's bands "The Clash," it's a question that we must ask ourselves on a regular basis.
You will often hear people say; "the only thing constant in life is change." 
While change is a fact of life, it doesn't mean you need to givie up or starting over every time something gets tough. 

As I work with people from all walks of life, one of the most concerning trends I have witnessed is the "disposable" attitude most people have about the most important aspects of their lives.  When things get difficult, people often give up on friends, marriages, careers, businesses, family, etc...  Nothing is safe. 
As I stated in an earlier post, "people quit everything."  I shake my head daily as I watch people sell themselves short or give up on the people around them.

To be clear, sometimes you need to make a change and begin again... but when?
I don't claim to have all the answers, but after working with people over the last 25 years, there is one thing that I am certain of... "Walking away and giving up should be your LAST resort...not your first."

Whenever I get upset at my current circumstances and want to make a change in my life, I always ask myself  two critical questions:
1. Am I in the right place? 
    Is this person, business, or relationship worth my time and effort, or am I wasting my time?
    More often than not, we are the weak link, so here is another way to look at it,
    If I was right would this be right?
2. Have I given it all I have? 
    You have to be honest on this one. Ask yourself this, if I was on my "A" game, would I have different    results than I have now... and have I given it enough time to see the results?
Most people don't quit, they just give up before they ever get good or see the results they want.

If you believe that you are not in the right place and you have given it your all, then maybe it is time for a change... But if you are in the right place and you haven't given your best, then I would stay put and get back to work!  Your "future" self will thank you for it....

That's my "take," what's yours?

Why We’re Broke and How To Fix It.

Posted: Monday, April 5, 2010 by Unknown in Labels: , ,
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( The following article was found by my wife on the internet and unfortunately, I can't find the author. But I agree 100% with their opinion on Multiple income streams. Much of the stress, frustration, and financial hardships that so many people have gone through the last few years could have been avoided by increasing your options. I teach this principle daily... and you don't have to do what I do, but you do need to do something! )
Enjoy, Lance
www.lancesmith.com


Take a Hummer full of average self-made millionaires. Strand them in the desert. Strip them of their money. Take away everything they own. Rob them of their connections, their networks, their families. Ten to one they’re millionaires again in less than five years.
Can you be a millionaire in five years? As it stands right now, probably not. So what is it that’s different about John Q. Millionaire? Why can he take his kids to Euro Disney and you can’t? Because he depends on himself and the rest of the world depends on, well, the rest of the world.

We used to be self-reliant. For 40,000 years of human history, we depended on ourselves. We were part of a small network of people who helped each other out, but mainly we fixed our own clothes, cooked our own meals and traded our own chickens to make our way in this world. We were Jacks of all trades. When our roof broke, we didn’t hope we had money left on our Visa to pay a specialist to come out and fix it — we cut down a tree and went up the ladder. If the wheat crop was poor, we always had the cows. Wife took in some sewing work, husband ploughed the fields. If one thing went wrong, we didn’t cross our fingers and pray the big man down the lane would waltz in to take care of us. Sometime around the industrial revolution, we gave the responsibility of feeding our families to a bunch of old guys in suits that cost more than our car. Or horse, as the case may have been.
Rich people came in and, as part of an income diversification strategy, decided to build some factories. We started to specialize. We became widget stampers, widget joiners, widget movers. Our self-identity became one of what we did to which widgets for eight or 10 or 12 hours a day. Western culture became one of efficiency. How could we do it faster? How could we make it easier? How could we work it cheaper?

Then, on April Fools’ Day, 1913, Henry Ford added a conveyor belt to the whole process and generalism went to hell. Flash forward 95 years and we live in a world of 10-page job descriptions that itemize exactly what we do — and more importantly, what we don’t do. We put cute little comic strips in our cubicles that scream “Not my department”. We do the same thing, every day, for years at a time. Optimally, we do our one thing and one thing only more efficiently than any other person in town. And in order to ensure we have time for all of this efficiency, we have outsourced the rest of our lives to other specialists. Specialists grow our food and make our clothes and educate our children while we go be specialists for someone else. We believed we were making things easier. Instead we were handing over every tiny scrap of personal power we had left. Because in addition to making life soul-suckingly boring, this specialist employee system made us really, really vulnerable. We are totally dependent on a bunch of strangers to make sure little Madison and Jacob can keep going to Baby Salsa. We depend on everybody else standing at the conveyor belt to not screw the whole thing up, increasing company costs and decreasing employee salaries. We depend on the dude above us, the one who kissed so much ass he got off the conveyor belt, to dole out our raises and not favor the guy next to us. We depend on the marketing department to do a good job selling the stuff that comes off the conveyor belt. We depend on the guy who owns the conveyor belt to act in a fiscally responsible yet compassionate manner. We depend on the public at large to keep their own conveyor belt jobs so they can afford to buy the widgets we’re cranking out so efficiently. And if every single one of those people on whom we depend does their job the way we hope they will, we get a check every couple weeks that pays most of our bills. That’s good, right? That makes it all worth it, doesn’t it?

How The Rich Stay Rich The primary breadwinners among us hesitate to tell our spouse that the raise might not come through this year. We whisper, so the kids don’t hear, that maybe our vacation has to wait. Maybe the remodeling plan was a little ambitious. Maybe we can make do with the old Corolla. The stay-at-home wife tries to stretch the turkey to make a few more brown bag lunches, pastes on a smile and tells the little ones that Daddy’s doing the best he can. The single mom tries not to cry when she tells her kids that of course she misses them when she’s at work. She would have loved to be with them when they had chicken pox but she couldn’t afford to take the day off.

Why does this happen? Because we rely on one stream of income and construct our entire lives around the panic that it might disappear. The rich, on the other hand, have been handily avoiding this trap for years. Their golfing buddy the financial planner has been ensuring they diversify their investments so economic downturns don’t hurt them. The conveyor belt hysteria doesn’t affect them in the slightest. Our paycheck can’t even send little Aidan to hockey camp. We’ve got nothing left to invest in anything, let alone a diversified portfolio. But as the pundits so wisely explain — right after explaining that the ticket to riches is cutting back on your latte consumption — that diversification is the key to wealth, security and freedom. As in, you’re not supposed to put all your eggs in one basket. Would you put your family’s life savings in one stock? Would you put little Emma’s college fund into something you don’t understand, has no guarantees, and over which you have zero control? No? Then why are you doing it with your family’s income?

Recently, in a small town in Ontario, the area’s largest employer closed its doors. Most of the town, trained only in the art and science of making canned soup, found themselves out of work. A few thousand soup makers live in a town where nobody wants to pay them to make soup. Now all of them are going to try to find a way to apply their skill sets to other employers in the area. The competition is fierce, and their mortgages are on the line. Except there are no other major employers in the area, least of all ones that can make use of Jerry’s 12 years of mushroom chopping experience. Some of them will find jobs, sure, and good for them. But many others are going to have to reinvent themselves. Reinvention is difficult enough. Reinventing yourself, your family’s lifestyle, your social status and your skill set in an economy where everybody else is trying to do the same thing is virtually impossible. But let’s rewind the clock a few years for our favorite mushroom chopper, Jerry. Imagine if Jerry had found a few hours a week, when he wasn’t at the conveyor belt, to diversify the sources of his family’s income. Maybe he started a mushroom blog and now makes a few hundred bucks a month in affiliate income promoting the latest kitchen gadgets. Perhaps his wife picked up the knitting needles and started whipping up a few shawls and baby blanket. Maybe she found she was good at this knitting gig and started designing a few patterns in her spare time. Jerry’s family picture looks a whole lot different. Flash forward again to the present, and Jerry’s mushroom chopping job is in jeopardy. His buddies at the conveyor belt are starting to freak out, but Jerry’s little income streams have been growing and they’ve started to add up. Jerry and his family now have options. They have choices. They have leverage. They have freedom. All because Jerry and his wife decided to turn off the CSI reruns and look into diversifying their income streams. He didn’t have to make a big, loud proclamation that he was quitting his job at the plant. They didn’t have to spend a fortune on office space or new computers or ergonomic chairs. They didn’t need business cards that said, “We’re serious business owners, dammit.” They just needed to diversify. For hundreds of years, diversification has been the luxury of the rich. Now, in the wake of broad globalization and mass internet access, we have a ticket to escape from this madness. It has never been easier to connect with suppliers, clients, customers, searchers, readers, fans.