1. Happy and successful people are optimistic.  That means that they believe that the things that they think, say and do really matter.  They believe this even when circumstances may be suggesting otherwise.  This is why athletes and musicians spend hours and hours practicing and building their skills by failing and making many mistakes – they know that all of their efforts matter and their failed attempts will pay off in the end. 

How does this translate to your business?  Well, it means that you continue to focus on your end desire and believe that everything you do is an important step toward reaching your goal even when:  you go to networking meetings and don’t get any referrals or bring in any new clients  . . .  you pour your heart and soul into a blog and receive very little feedback on your posts . . . you are doing great work with clients and having amazing results and still your business isn’t building as fast as you want it to . . .  you schedule a workshop and no one signs up.  No matter what you current circumstances suggest, you know that what you do and who you are makes a difference.

2. Happy and successful people build a social support network filled with positive people who believe in their potential.  In a separate study on happiness, researchers found that if you have one happy friend, then your overall happiness improves by 15%.  If your happy friend has a happy friend, then your happiness improves another 10% and if the happy friend of your happy friend has a happy friend, then your happiness increases by another 10%, even if you don’t know that person.  Since we are all connected by the wireless network of our mirror neurons (as discussed last time), then who we associate with and how we interact with them makes a difference in our happiness.  When we associate with positive, happy people who associate with other happy people, we are much happier.

3. Happy and successful people know how to manage their stress in positive and productive ways.  They have a toolbox of stress management skills and they use them.  One positive pattern is that when they are stressed, instead of withdrawing and isolating, happy and successful people reach out to their social network.  They call people, schedule times to meet with them in person so that they can shift to a more positive perspective.

4. Happy and successful people are grateful.  They train their brain to scan their environment looking for things that are going well and things to be grateful for.  Even in times of crises, they are searching for opportunities and ways to make positive changes in their situation.  The truth is that what you focus your attention on expands and amplifies.  When you are grateful and focusing on the positive, the positive will expand and there will be more to be grateful for.

So, you can decide to be happy now by doing the following things:

1. Believe that what you think, what you say and what you do matters – YOU matter!
2. Develop your social network and make friends with positive people who believe in your potential and who have happy friends who have happy friends.
3. Learn and use positive and productive stress management techniques and regularly reach out to your social network, especially when you are stressed.
4. Train your brain to look for what is going well and the opportunities that are always available
5. Be grateful.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.  Please share them below.

Let’s talk about happiness.

Several years ago I had a conversation with a childhood friend who had a lot of financial ups and downs in her adult life that really hit home.  She too had always lived in the mindset of “life will be better when . . .”   In our conversation she said that she realized that this was her life.  She was tired of waiting to be happy and decided to be happy now, regardless of what her financial state. 

That really struck me as truth.  In the years since our conversation, I have read many things about applying Universal truths and spiritual principals to achieve success in money, business and life.  All of them teach that happiness is the beginning state for success, not the end result.  Start with being happy and success will follow. 

Science has now started studying happiness.  I recently listened to an interview with Shawn Anchor who studied happiness and optimism for 10 years at Harvard and is the author of The Happiness Advantage.  He stated that happy/optimistic people are usually the most successful people.  They found that when the brain is feeling happy, every output your brain performs increases.  That means that you are more productive, more creative, more intelligent and you actually work faster and more focused.  You have more access to your brain’s resources when you are happy. 

He discussed the mirror neurons in the brain that act like a wireless network that connects all of us together.  When we see someone smile, the mirror neurons begin to fire and we perceive ourselves as smiling and our brain dumps more dopamine (the ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter) into our system and we feel better. 

As a result of this wireless network we all are tapped into, he found that positive/ optimistic sales people out perform negative sales people by 56%.  People perceive them as more charismatic and more attractive than negative sales people.  This is exciting information to have because the reality is that if you are in business, you are in sales.  So if you want more people to say “yes” to your products and services, then decide to be happy, feel optimistic and think positive.

The easiest way to be happy is to be grateful.  Research has shown that you can’t be negative and grateful at the same time – the two simply cannot coexist in the mind and body at the same time.  Happy people train their brain to be grateful by scanning their environment for the gifts, blessings and opportunities available to them.  So here is an easy exercise to help you begin to focus on being happy now.  First, make a list of 50 (yes, 50) things that you are grateful for and that give you pleasure and bring you happiness.  Next, add at least 5 things to that list every day.

When you base happiness on achieving success first, then you have made happiness unreachable.  Every time you reach a goal and experience success, you set another goal that you then attach happiness to and happiness becomes a moving target.  So if you really want to be successful, use “the happiness advantage” and decide to be happy now, regardless of what is going on around you.  You’ll be surprised at how easily and quickly success comes.     

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.

“Authentic Marketing” is a popular phrase these days.

That may sound like a “duh” statement, but it really isn’t.  How often do you really show up as who you are and stand in all your glory and power?  Be honest.  The truth is … most people don’t.  They shrink back because they worry about offending people by speaking their truth or making others feel bad by shining too brightly or being laughed at for sharing their big vision for their business or outgrowing loved ones if they commit to embracing their power.

Sound familiar?

The other thing that may be standing in your way of being powerfully you is your belief that in order to be successful, you have to act and speak in certain ways and embrace values that are different than your own.  I’ve seen that happen so many times.  Heck, I’ve done that myself.  Here’s a truth I’ve learned.  You can’t show up powerfully as someone else . . . that’s just a weak imitation of someone else’s power.  You can only show up powerfully as YOU.

Here’s the paradoxical truth.  The more you show up as who you are, warts and all, and the more comfortable you are in your skin, the more people are attracted to you.  People don’t want to work with people who are perfect.  Perfect makes us insecure.  People want to work with people who are real.  They want to know that you have struggled, had failures and disappointments and yet you have gotten up, dusted yourself off and continued to go after what you want.

Being powerfully you isn’t easy, though.  It means that you have to be honest – with others and with yourself.  It means that you have to speak the truth even when it’s hard or not popular.  It means that people might not like the things you do or say, or they might call your opinion stupid or ignorant.  It means doing the right thing according to your values and priorities, even when “experts” disagree.  It means making yourself a priority even when loved ones complain or try to sabotage your efforts.

When you show up as powerfully you, standing in your brilliance, comfortable in your skin and speaking your truth, you will create a strong reaction within people.  Either they will love you and resonate with your truth or they won’t.  The ones that do will form the basis of a loyal community who are hungry for what you have to offer.  The ones that don’t will go away.  The powerful YOU knows that both reactions are great!

I encourage you to take an honest look at how powerfully you are showing up in your business.  How many times have you been afraid to be visible . . . or tell someone you can help them  . . . or share a strong opinion . . .  or risk being vulnerable  . . . or speak your truth?  How many times have you used marketing language or a sales formula that feels wrong to you?  How many times have you told a client what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear because you were afraid of losing them? 

 It’s time to stop hiding.  The world needs to see the real, authentic powerful YOU.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.

Last year I read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks.

Our skills, abilities and knowledge fall into 4 different categories which Hendricks refers to as zones.  These zones are Incompetence, Competence, Excellence and Genius/Brilliance.  Let’s look at these zones and how they show up in your business.

1. The Zone of Incompetence describes the knowledge, skills and abilities that we don’t have.  It makes sense that when we encounter things within this zone, we would hand them over to someone who does have the knowledge, skills and abilities to handle them quickly and easily, right?  You would think so . . . . but let me ask you this question.  How many times have you spent hours trying to figure something out or make something happen only to end up frustrated or discouraged?

I did that when I was first starting to get my business online.  I knew I needed a newsletter so I hired a graphic designer to create the template, picked an auto-responder, wrote my content and then spend about 10 hours looking at html code and trying to successfully load my newsletter into the auto-responder.  10 HOURS!  Finally when I realized I was on the brink of throwing my computer out the window and abandoning my dreams of taking my business online, I reached out for help.  It took someone else 10 minutes to do what I had struggled 10 hours to do and failed.  I was definitely operating in my zone of incompetence.

So many business owners spend way too much time in their zone of incompetence because they have a limited budget and they think they are saving money by learning how to do it themselves.  When I calculate how much money I wasted by spending 10 hours fooling around with that newsletter compared to the amount I spend on hiring an assistant who had those skills to do it, I am mortified.

2. The Zone of Competence is where you have the knowledge, skills and abilities to complete a task or do the job, but it’s not how you enjoy spending your time.  It’s a “should do” not an “I get to do”.  This is another area where, for financial reasons, many business owners spend too much time.  They can do the task and so to save money, they do it themselves.

Here’s the thing, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it.  When you are doing things that you are capable of doing but don’t like to do, you tend to procrastinate.  You either procrastinate doing the thing you don’t like doing, moving it from one to do list to another; or you use the task as an excuse not to do the important things in your business like marketing, networking and talking to prospective clients because you are “too busy”.

I just had a conversation this week with one of my clients who hates doing bookkeeping tasks.  She is capable of doing them and her reason for not hiring a book keeper is that it is easier to do it herself than to explain it to someone else.  She doesn’t like doing the data entry in to QuickBooks and as a result, she puts it off and then floats from month to month not knowing what her business finances really are.  Her insistence on working in her zone of competence is wasting her time and hurting her business on many levels.

3. The Zone of Excellence is the place where you have expert knowledge, specialized skills and top notch abilities.  You are really good at operating in this arena and you usually receive significant rewards (validation, praise, money, recognition) for your work.  This sounds like a great place to hang out . . . doing good work, getting praise, recognition, validation and money for doing something you like . . . . what’s not to like?  It is a nice, comfortable place and many business owners spend their entire life in the zone of excellence.

The risk of staying in excellence is that you can begin to feel stagnant and burned out.  Even though you are really good at what you do, you begin to lose your passion and excitement for it.  It becomes harder and harder to stay motivated and engaged.

4. The Zone of Genius is your sweet spot.  It is the knowledge, skills and abilities you have that give you tremendous passion and make you want to get out of bed every day just so that you get to do them.  They are the things that make you lose track of time and you would do them even if you didn’t get paid.  Often, they are special interests or specific aspects of what you do in your zone of excellence.

To keep the passion alive in your business, it is important to keep digging and discovering your genius and implementing your brilliance into your business.  I have recently discovered my genius and it has made all the difference in how I feel about my business and the clients I am attracting to it.

What to do with this information:

1.  Let go of the tasks that fall into your zone of incompetence as soon as possible.  I know that may feel scary, but I promise you that the relief you feel will be immediate and worth every penny you spend to hire someone else to do it.
2. Make a list of the tasks that are in your zone of competence that you don’t like to do or regularly procrastinate doing.  Make a plan to get them off your plate as soon as possible so that you can spend the majority of your time operating in you zones of excellence and genius.
3. Begin looking for your areas of genius and brilliance.  What gets you excited when you have the opportunity to do it?  What could you do for hours and not get bored or tired?  When you find your brilliance, incorporate it into your business as much as possible.  When you work in your brilliance and let other people work in theirs within your business, you will be amazed at the opportunities that open up for you as a result.

I’d love for you to share your thoughts on this article and to hear what you have discovered about your zone of brilliance.

Building your business without a working written plan is like building a house without blueprints. If you want to build a sturdy house that will protect you from storms and last for generations, you wouldn’t just buy some wood and starting hammering it together without an idea of what you are going to do next (at least I hope you wouldn’t). You would be wasting a tremendous amount of time, energy and money. You have to have a plan for the finished product, know what supplies you need, organize the projects so that they build on each other, understand the specialized skills needed to complete each section so you can learn them or hire them out and create a time line to keep moving the progress forward.

So it is with creating a business plan. Here are the basics for writing a successful plan for your business.

1. Create a big vision for your business. This first step is challenging for many people because it is often difficult to see beyond their current reality and immediate needs.  This is essential because it provides you with the mental picture of the “finished product” you are creating. This is where you get to use your imagination for the good of your business.  A great place to start is what Dan Sullivan calls the 10x goal.  If you were to increase your business by 10x, what would it look like?  Be as specific and detailed as possible.

2. Define your values. In order for your business to be successful, you want to make sure you are building it around your core values. What are your top 5 life values? If freedom one of your values, you don’t want to create a business that has you stuck in the office working 80 hours a week.  Likewise if family is a top value, then you don’t want to create a business that has you traveling away from your family 6 months out of the year.

3. Clarify your mission. What is your business here to do?  What is the purpose of your products and services and who are they designed to help?  How do you, your employees, your customers/clients and the community benefit from your business being in existence?

4. Create specific objectives. What are the things that need to be in place for you to reach your 10x vision?  How much profit?  How many clients?  How much revenue?  How many contracts? What type of income streams?

5. Develop effective strategies. Describe the strategies needed to reach each of your objectives. How are you going to obtain that many clients?  How will you generate that much revenue?  How will you be marketing?  How will you get that much exposure?

6. Define a clear action plan. What action steps do you need to take to implement the strategies?  What systems do you need to have in place?  What type of specialized knowledge/skills do you need?  Who will be supporting you and what will they be responsible for doing?

These six steps are the basis for a working business plan. Once you write it, keep it on your desk, on your desktop or posted on your wall so you can refer to it regularly. It will keep you on track and focused on where you are going and it will provide you with consistent material for your daily “to do” lists.

As you learn, grow, shift and expand, keep updating, revising and tweaking your business plan so it can continue to guide you and your business toward your 10x goal.  Before you know it, you can create the business you dreamed about.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.  Please share your comments below.

I was recently talking with a friend and colleague of mine.  We were talking about how there are some people who say they want one thing, but the behaviors and actions being taken say something completely different.  This is where my years of experience with human behavior and my gift of seeing underlying patterns that sabotage success come in handy. 

Being incongruent between stated goals and actions taken is very common for people.  When it shows up in your business, it can have devastating consequences.  Let me ask you a question . . . How many times have you set a goal or said something was really, really important but not taken ANY steps toward achieving it or, worse still, taken action that will sabotage you reaching that goal?

Before you say “I never do that”, let’s look at some concrete examples. . . .

•  You are feeling really stressed about your cash flow and you know you need to generate new business but you just don’t seem to find the time to touch base with former clients, or make calls from your follow up list, or attend any networking meetings.

•  You vowed to start taking better care of yourself but instead of exercising and eating healthy meals, you find yourself hitting the drive thrus for lunch and spending your evenings on the couch in front of the TV.

•  You say you want to spend more time with your children and make family time a priority, but you continually book late appointments and put business in front of everything else.

•  You want to create an organized marketing system that leads prospects into doing business with you, but you are too overwhelmed and can’t find the time because you keep letting yourself get pulled in by distractions and shiny objects.

•  You have a new high end product or service you really want to sell but you aren’t actively marketing it and looking for potential buyers and you don’t even mention it in your conversations with people.

•  You want to quit smoking but you keep buying cigarettes vowing that this will be your last pack.

Any of those sound familiar?  If you are honest, at least one of them rings true for you.  I know I have done several of these at one point or another.  So why would we sabotage ourselves from getting what we say we want?  Well, there are many reasons, so for now (unless you want to be reading for the next hour or two) I’ll briefly cover 3 of the most common reasons you get in your own way.

1.  You don’t want it bad enough to make the decision to have it.  Making the decision to have it means doing the things you need to do to get it.  Those things often involve giving up something to get something better in return (giving up TV time or sleeping an extra hour in the morning instead of making time for exercise).  Since you haven’t made the decision, the desired thing is still in the “wish” or the “Gosh wouldn’t it be nice to have” category instead of being a goal.  This can be because the stated goal is something that someone else wants for you … you have stated the goal to please them or because it’s just not a big priority and where you want to focus your energy right now.  Until you make a decision, it’s a wish, not a goal.

2.  The goal that you have set is bigger than the story you have created for yourself.  We all create stories for ourselves about what we do and don’t deserve, what we can and can’t accomplish, who we are and are not.  We are conscious of part of the story and other parts are driven by our unconscious and out of our awareness.  If the goal or the steps you need to take are outside of what you think you deserve, what you think you can accomplish or who you think you are, then you will sabotage yourself from succeeding until you recognize your story and re-write it to allow for your goal. 

3.  You are stuck in victim consciousness and aren’t ready to move out of it.  I know that sounds strange, but hear me out.  Victim consciousness is like quick sand.  It is sticky and can suck you down quickly if you let it.  When you are stuck, you often don’t know that you are stuck and wallowing (yes, I said wallowing).  Setting the goals gives the appearance of being ready to get unstuck, but often what happens is that every action you need to take to reach the goal has been previously tried and doesn’t work.  People give you suggestions on how you can reach your goal and there is always a “reason” that the suggestion won’t work . . . none of the suggestions will work.  That’s a major clue that you are stuck (and probably wallowing) in victim consciousness.  You can’t move forward until you get unstuck.

So, now it’s time to look at your goals (business and personal) and decide which ones you are ready to make a decision to have.  Which ones do you really want bad enough to do what it takes to do to have them?  Once you have selected those, let the others go for now.  You can revisit them later, after you have accomplished these goals.  Letting the others go will free up your energy and allow it to be congruent so you focus on achieving your real goals.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.  Please share them below.

Let’s talk about capitalism.  This is a subject I have been thinking a lot about recently.  I am currently reading the book Conscious Capitalism:  Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, the Founder and Co-CEO of Whole Foods Market.   The truth is that capitalism has gotten a bad rap in the last few decades.  In fact, there are people in the world who would love to see free capitalism come to an end.  They equate it with unbridled greed, over consumption and abuse of power.   

Those people are crazy . . . capitalism is awesome, right?!?!

Well, no and yes.  As with everything that exists, capitalism has a light and shadow side.  In the light side, free capitalism has the ability to dramatically improve quality of life by empowering people, providing education and opportunity and increasing wealth within society as a whole.  Here are just a few facts Mackey shares in his book.  In the past 200 years that free capitalism has been in existence, average life expectancy has more than doubled world wide; the percentage of undernourished people in the world has dropped from 26 percent to 13 percent in the last 40 years; literacy rates have sky rocketed to 84 percent of all adults being able to read; access to education has improved from 9 percent of Americans having a high school diploma in 1910 to the current level of 85 percent with 40 percent of Americans over 25 having a college degree; and the world’s extreme poverty rate (less than $1 a day) has decreased from 85 percent to 16 percent. 

In its shadow side, capitalism encourages abuse of power, deceit, greed and monopolization of resources.  The news is full of companies practicing the dark arts of capitalism, using the system to control, dominate and crush those that get in their way. 

Unfortunately we don’t hear much about the businesses who are practicing responsible capitalism and are using their powers to make the world a better place for their customers, their employees, their investors and their communities.  I have done business with many large companies and small businesses who value profit and are driven toward growth, and do it in a way that creates win/win situations for everyone concerned.  Their customers, employees, investors, community and bottom line benefit from how they do business.

They give back, pay it forward, and take responsibility for their actions all in service to their higher purpose.   As a result, they are very profitable.  Mackey reports that a “representative sample of conscious firms outperformed the overall stock market by a ratio of 10.5:1 over a fifteen-year period, delivering more than 1,600 percent total returns when the market was up just of 150 percent for the same period.” 

I think it’s time for a revolution!  It’s time for the environmentally conscious, socially aware, purpose driven capitalists to step up and evolve free capitalism to the next level. 

I’d really like this to be a discussion so please share your thoughts below.  

I recently listened to an interview with Darren Hardy, the founder of Success Magazine.  He talked about what happens when things don’t go the way we plan in business and in life.  You know, those things that shake your confidence, affect your identity or turn your world upside down . . . divorce, death of a loved one, a serious health crises, bankruptcy, closing a business, downsizing, foreclosure and natural disaster are some of the big examples.  There are many little ways that we can be rattled because how we thought things worked and who we thought we were has been challenged. . . . someone giving us a bad review or leaving a nasty comment on our blog, not closing the big client, getting 15 “no’s” in a row from potential clients, a loved one not believing in our business vision and pushing us to get a job, putting our heart and soul into a program and no one buys it.  These are all things that we encounter in business and in life.  How we deal with them determines whether we bounce or splat.

Darren used a ball metaphor and identified 3 distinct stages of the process.  I really liked the stages he outlined and want to share them with you adding my own Melanie perspective.

The Fall – as soon as the negative situation happens and affects life as we know it, we begin the fall.  During the fall, things feel out of control.  Chaos swirls around us and fear, self doubt and frustration abound.  The fall affects how we see ourselves and who we thought we were.  We often experience an identity crisis where we don’t know who we are, what we feel and what we are capable of doing, being or having anymore.  The answers and solutions to our problem are elusive and we are free falling.  We spend a lot of emotional, mental and spiritual energy trying to grab on to anything that will stop the fall and give us some solid ground under our feet.

The Impact – we hit the bottom.  Sometimes we see the bottom coming and we brace for the impact, other times we think we have hit the bottom only to find we are falling again so the true impact comes as surprise to us.  During impact we feel the full effects of the situation.  The changes are no longer imagined, they are real, unavoidable and painful.  It is a time to grieve our losses.

Now here is the good news . . . what we do during impact determines whether we splat or bounce back up.  If we keep our focus on what was and everything we have lost, looking for someone to blame, we will SPLAT.  We make ourselves into victims holding on to righteous anger and nursing resentment.  We stay emotionally stuck, wallowing in self pity and protecting ourselves from further pain with anger and bitterness.  We hate where we are but we are afraid to take the risk of moving forward because we might fall again.

The Bounce -  we use the point of impact to truly grieve our losses, let go of the past, reassess ourselves and our life, count our blessings and create a new vision of what we want to do, be or have.  If we are open to stepping into an expanded identity and creating a different plan, we can use the energy of the impact to spring us upward again with the possibility of going even farther and higher than we were before. 

Many, many successful people have fallen hard and lost almost everything.  They made the choice to use the impact to take them back up and further than they realized was possible.  Look around – these people are everywhere, everyday people turning tragedy into a springboard for inventing themselves.  Life didn’t create them, they created their life.  So let me ask you . . . when you experience your next fall (big or little) are you going to splat or bounce?  The choice is yours.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article. 

Life always provides us an opportunity to learn.

Business is mostly a mental game.  There is skill and technique involved, but mostly it’s mental.  Growing a business requires stepping outside of your comfort zone and taking risks that scare the bejeebies out of you.  If you get caught up in the fear and self doubt that come with trying new things and focus your attention on what could go wrong, you are setting yourself up for failure. 

Why?  Because the laws of the Universe say that what you focus on expands.  If you are caught in the grips of fear and using your creative energy to develop doomsday scenarios of failure, loss and humiliation that is what you’ll experience.  Where your thoughts go is where your mental and emotional energy flows; and that affects the reality you experience.  It’s that simple. 

3 Steps to mastering the mental game of business:

1.  Focus on what can go right.  Research has shown that successful people as a group are more positive than the general population.   You can train yourself to be more positive.  For every doomsday scenario that pops into your mind, acknowledge it by saying “Yes, that is possible and there are many other possible outcomes as well”.  List as many as you can think of and then use your creative energy to imagine a positive outcome that brings you happiness and peace.  Spend a few minutes focusing on that outcome.  The less time you spend indulging the fear and negative imagination and the more time you spend focusing on the possible positive outcomes, the more you are mastering the mental game of business.

Focusing on the positive possibilities gets you in the habit of seeing the positive in your current situation.  The more you focus on the positive in the present circumstances, the more the positive will continue to grow and expand.  That doesn’t mean that negative situations will never happen, but once you learn how to look for the positive, they will happen less frequently and when they do, finding the positive within them makes them easier to handle. 

2.  Keep looking where you want to go.  When riding a horse, you have to look toward where you are going to get the horse to go there.  They go where your eyes are focused.  Same is true with business.  Keep looking at where you are going and don’t get distracted with what is going on around you.  It is so easy to loose sight of the big vision for your business and get caught up in the “details” of everyday life – tight cash flow, unexpected expenses, sudden down turn in referrals, losing a big client, personal problems.  When you take your eyes off where you are going and begin focusing your mental and emotional energy fully on the “problems”, negativity and fear begin to take over and your business follows where you are looking and focusing (see explanation above).

Distractions come up, life happens.  Deal with the issues while keeping focused on where you are going.  Don’t get emotionally involved in the “problems”.  You can address them and make plans to correct issues and remain emotionally detached.  Reserve your emotional attachment for your vision and where you are headed.  When you become emotionally invested in the distractions, fear and negativity, you change the outcomes you will receive. 

3.  Acknowledge and celebrate all of your accomplishments.  I’m amazed at how easily people over look or minimize the progress and accomplishments they have completed and choose to place their focus on what didn’t get done or the goals they haven’t accomplished yet.  Make sure to celebrate the little steps as well as the big ones.  You can easily do this by keeping  a “Yeah Me!” list, write about them on your blog, post them in an online forum, share them with colleagues, post them on twitter or your face book wall, tell your coach or mentor.  Celebrate the big and little stuff and you will have more and more to celebrate. 

The more you celebrate, the happier and more accomplished you’ll feel and the easier it is to focus on what can go right and where you want to go.  The more you focus on what can go right and where you are going, the more you will have to celebrate. 

And that’s how you master the mental game of business. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.  Please post your comments below.

I was listening to an interview with Darren Hardy from Success Magazine recently.  He stated that we are living in the best time, ripe with opportunity and possibility in the history of our country.  Given all the craziness in the American Government and the doom and gloom predictions of the global economy, it gave me pause for thought.  He went on to explain that because of the rapidly changing technology, solo entrepreneurs and small business owners have access to people and resources that were only available to large corporations before.  In fact, small businesses have an advantage over large corporations because in order to take advantage of the opportunities available, you have to act quickly and be able to easily change, adapt and grow.

Change, adapt and grow . . . something I worked with people on doing for the last twenty plus years of my life.  I thought about what he was saying and realized that the businesses that are going to make it are the ones who have owners that understand the importance of continued learning, growth and development AND commit themselves and their company to the learning process. 

Business owners have three main areas where they need continued growth and development:  the skills of their trade, the skills of running a business and personal development.  Let’s look at each of these categories.

Skills of the Trade mean that you stay current with the latest advancements, techniques, products and technology essential to your industry.  This is essential if you want to remain relevant and provide the best help available to your clients and customers.  If you were diagnosed with cancer, you wouldn’t want to see a doctor who was still relying on the research and treatment protocols from 10 years ago, right?

Business Skills mean that you continue to grow and develop in learning the skills you need to run your business.  This covers a whole range of skills from business planning and budgeting, product development, creating policies and procedures and hiring and staff retention issues to networking etiquette, marketing strategies and sales skills so that you can get your products and services out in the market place.  These lay the foundation and hold the structure of your business.  Would you live in a house made from cardboard and built on sand?    

Personal Development means that you understand that as the captain of your business, your belief systems, fears, insecurities, weaknesses, strengths, competencies, genius and unique abilities determine the success or failure of your business.  Who you are, what you think and feel, where you place your focus and how you operate in the world directly affects the bottom line of your business – how much money you can make, what clients you get (or don’t get), who refers to you, how satisfying your work is and how happy you are.  Your business can and will only grow as much as you as an individual are willing to grow. 

For you to take advantage of the opportunities available during this time and succeed in your business, continued development in all three of these areas is critical.  When a business is struggling or has hit a plateau that you can’t break through, it usually means that at least one of these areas is being ignored. 

So, if you are feeling stuck and frustrated because you can see the next level but you don’t know how to get there, I strongly encourage you to take a look at each of these categories and honestly evaluate how much time, energy and money you are willing to invest in learning and developing these skills. 

If you would like some help looking at your 2012 results and setting your 2013 goals, I have opened up some time in the next two weeks to speak with motivated individuals.  click here to set up a complimentary, no obligation consultation.