3 Way To Enhance Focus
Focus is something that almost everyone struggles with. Especially in a world full of distractions, the ability to focus comes at a premium. Here are 3 suggestions to help you develop focus! 1. Meditate When you meditate, your brain will shift from primarily alpha waves to theta waves. Theta waves will encourage creativity, support problem-solving and increase memory. Theta waves will improve your focus and keep you calm and balanced. 2. Exercise Exercise improves concentration, memory and mood. Physical activity will immediately boost dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin levels all of which have an impact on concentration and focus. 3. Work on self-awareness We tend to be overconfident and overly optimistic when it comes to decision making. In fact, more often than not, actions do not lead to the exact results we expect nor does the amount of time it takes to accomplish a task line up with our expectations. When it comes to focusing in on what’s important, and figuring out what that is, the more self aware you are, the better off you’ll be! To manage your self-awareness, take your estimates and when it comes to your confidence levels, cut it by 20%. If you’re 100% confident, move forward as if you’re only 80% confident. Likewise, if you believe something will happen then you need to reduce your expectations and be more conservative. This will be more expensive by 50%, adjust to 70% mentally. Think it will take 2 hours? Plan for 2 ½ hours. These are fixes to help adjust your self-awareness if it needs some work. These fixes will help you better manage your decision making and focus on what’s most important. If you need some serious help with self-awareness, join us in the lab where it’s a topic that comes up frequently! You can access the lab here. You can also listen in to our podcast with Robert Morrison where decision making and focusing on priorities was a major topic of conversation!
The Influence Of Mindset
Mindset can have great influence on who we are and what we achieve. If you didn’t check out our weekly newsletter on this topic, shoot us a note and we’ll send you a one off. We explore how the concept of our thoughts being our existence first came into the world of philosophy all the way nearly 500 years ago! But enough about philosophy, here is the simple truth. Our beliefs and our thoughts drive our actions. Our actions, our beliefs and our thoughts are who we are in this world. It’s no more complicated than that. Here’s proof. Who do you believe you are? What do you think you’re good at? What do you think you’re bad at? When you do the things that you believe you’re good at, are you good at them? When you do the things you think you’re bad at, are you bad at them? Even if you were wonderful at the things you thought you were bad at, if you believed strongly enough you were bad, if you thought strongly enough you were bad, even objective observers would start to be persuaded that you were bad. In fact, the power of thought is so strong that even something you carry expertise in can be cast into doubt with the smallest of questions. Have you ever been asked a question about something you at any other time would be 100% positive about? Something you knew so certainly that you’d bet your life on it? Then all of a sudden, that certainty is questioned and now you’re doubting your own knowledge that you would have bet your life on at another time. This happens to people all of the time. It’s perfectly natural and it’s also perfectly indicative of how strongly our thoughts influence who we are. Are we an expert, or are we a fraud? Do we know this for certain, or do we doubt our own expertise? Our mindset is an enormous driver of our success in our professional and our personal lives. Mindset is at the core of everything we do in the Lab and is central to our beRICH mindset and a foundation part of our process, Mastery With Science. Every day we have an opportunity to be aware of and control our own internal narrative. We think, therefore we are and we are what we think. How you let your mindset influence you will influence, impact and control how you show up every day in your own life and the lives of the people around you. Want to know more about mindset? Join us in the lab here, where we will be discussing this theme throughout the week. You can also listen in to our most recent podcast with special guest, Suzanne Taylor of Taylord Consulting. Suzanne is a practitioner of Positive Psychology and helps her clients combat the self-sabotage of negative self talk and harmful mindsets! Listen to the Podcast
How To Set Expectations With Customer Service
Customer service is about the culture you want your clients to experience. The culture you develop likely has some core, fundamental pieces to it. For example, culturally, most professionals and businesses want their clients to feel that they are competent, capable and communicative. These are commonalities for most business cultures. Not every culture is alike, however and there are always key differences here for businesses looking to set themselves apart. One way to absolutely set yourself apart is by setting expectations around how you run your business. One example I’ll give you is the ‘classic’ mortgage broker or real estate agent. They are tied to their cells and they make a promise to their clients; I will always be available day or night for you. I will always pick up my phone. I will always be there. This is an expectation they are setting with their clients. As long a they maintain that level of service they will always meet or exceed their client expectations. After all, anyone can say they will be available any time of day, but how many people will answer the phone at 11:30 p.m. We wouldn’t! Another example I’ve run across is the financial professional and a large brand name firm. My culture is all about answering the phone. My administrative assistant knows that NO phone call ever goes to voice mail during business hours. This, for him, was a key differentiator in his culture and customer service. Again, as long as they meet the expectations they set, their clients will always be happy. The challenge here is in both circumstances, these professionals are making a promise that could be very difficult, or, even impossible to meet consistently. When you put yourself in this position as a business owner, it creates opportunities and challenges. Take Nordstrom as an example. Their customer service is nothing short of AWESOME. If you’re not familiar with the classic Nordstrom story, go google it, seriously! Their customer service is out of this world and it elevates their culture and their brand and because they have consistently met client expectations it creates an outstanding customer service experience. Here’s the great news, you don’t need to be the mortgage broker or real estate agent that promises to answer their phone at any moment. You could just as easily be the mortgage broker or real estate agent that says, “I will return your call within 24 hours, always.” If the expectation is set, you’ll have clients that experience great customer service! To set expectations for customer service there is only 1 thing that really needs to be done, but it absolutely MUST be done. You must communicate to everyone what your culture is and what the expectations you can and will ALWAYS meet are! If you cannot meet those expectations DO NOT SET THEM. It will only create a poor customer service experience. Set something you can always meet or exceed and you will always win. The key here is simple. Communicate up front, from day 1! If you’re looking to join a tribe of like minded professionals that believe in the #beRICH mindset: Rising to Mastery, Inspiring Greatness, Celebrating Knowledge and Helping Others along the way, you’ll want to check out our private facebook group, Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. You can join the movement here! Join our Facebook Group Now!
Innovation and Online Learning
Online learning/E-Learning is one of the great potential disruptors of our time. I’m being serious. Higher education costs are skyrocketing; the average cost of tuition for higher education is going up 8% a year. That’s doubling the cost of education every 9 years or so. With the increased adaptability of online education systems such as course sites, meeting space, virtual class rooms and the onset of augmented reality, it really does make sense that great innovation is coming to the education space, specifically online learning. It’s backed by the money pouring into it too! As of 2020 the e-learning marketplace was a $250 billion market according to Global Market Insights. It’s expected to SURGE 21% per year to through 2027 to eclipse the $1 TRILLION mark. FYI it’s already 2021, are you prepared for that level of growth in the next 6 years?Oh, it’s not just paid for e-learning that growing either. Harvard alone has over 600 courses available online…FOR FREE. The market is exploding in all corners and every indicator is pointing to a lasting innovation. Still not convinced? How about looking at the strength of traditional universities today. A study and analysis by consultant Paul Friga of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges found that colleges could lose a collective $183 billion as a result of the pandemic. That is simply not sustainable. But there’s more. We are seeing greater and greater gender inequality at traditional higher education institutions. Today nearly 6 out of 10 students are female, an all time high. In fact over the last 5 years there’s been a drop of over 70% of men enrolled in higher education. It doesn’t take a data analyst to see that there is change here and more change coming in the educational space and it may very well be centered on the e-learning and digital learning platform. Innovation in this market is radically changing how we go about our education today. During times of radical change there is always an opportunity to continue to innovate. Our belief in the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab is that we can shift how business is done and how entrepreneurs and service-based professionals learn. We can innovate in this space and every piece of content we create is designed to help pave the road for professionals like you to have greater success and greater access to the tools you need to rise to mastery in your profession. If you’re in this space or thinking about entering into this space, join us in the lab, where we can all help each other grow. For more great conversation around innovation join us in the lab you can check it out here. To get a glimpse into how one of our very own members is innovating check out our most recent Podcast with Jeff Mount of Real Intelligence. You can listen in to our conversation with Jeff and how he’s actively innovating in the financial planning market. Listen now!
Discipline and Flexibility
If we asked you to describe what discipline felt like, how would you describe it? Would you say it felt harsh? Constraining? Cold? Rigid? Burdensome? Or would you say it felt empowering? Freeing? Constructive? As the Doc would say, how we view discipline is going to influence whether it triggers positive or negative thoughts in our minds. What we want to make clear is, no matter how you view discipline, whether it’s positive or negative, the fact is discipline is as flexible as your mind is. Discipline is what you make of it. If you find something difficult to do and you look at is as a chore, then it will require a tremendous amount of discipline to accomplish. That same difficult task can get done with much less challenge if you embrace the difficulty.Part of what we believe makes discipline so difficult for so many people is the view that discipline requires you to be very rigid. Like most concepts we talk about in the Lab and Mastery With Science, it’s about having a structure, not about being incredibly rigid. Think of a building in San Francisco. Chances are they are built to withstand strong earthquakes and that means they are meant to be able to bend and shift and move when the earth moves. Although there is structure to the buildings, they are not extremely rigid. If they were, they would collapse during earth quakes. Discipline can and should be built into your life like a building in San Francisco. By embracing discipline but not making it too rigid you’ll enable yourself to have greater success at implementing self-discipline in all aspects of your business and life. Enabling self-discipline will make it easier for you to accept the difficult situations head on and make the challenges that much less onerous and that much more rewarding. I’ll bring it back to having a routine. Every morning I like to wake up and go work out and exercise and then meditate. Now, that requires some discipline. There are absolutely mornings that I don’t want to get up and do this, I still do. But what happens when I CAN’T exercise in the morning? What happens when my schedule absolutely will not allow it or I’ve injured myself and I’m physically incapable of exercise? If I’m too rigid, it will throw me off my game. Getting back on your game is a lot harder than staying on your game, we try to avoid getting thrown off as much as we can. In this instance, too much rigidity and the moment life happens, I’m SOL (sh*t outta luck for those of you wondering). If I’m flexible I might turn around and say, ok I can’t workout and meditate this morning, but what about this evening or afternoon? Or, if I’m physically incapable of exercise, what else can I do to replicate the benefits of my exercise, or, can I double up on my meditation instead today? As you can see, flexibility allows me to maintain my discipline, adapt and pivot to the circumstances thrown at me, all while keeping me, on my game. If you want to learn more about discipline and especially discipline of strategy, go check out our conversation with Alex Brueckmann where we discuss how to apply discipline within your business strategy for greater results and success! You can check our conversation out here! Listen to Podcast For even more news, if you haven’t joined yet, you need to get your butt into our lab and join some like minded people who want to empower themselves with more time, more money and look and feel 100x better doing it! You can join us here.
How To Build Relationships Quickly And Effectively
Relationships are important and we are born with the need for them. The ability to form relationships, however, is not innate, it’s learned. Our ability to form relationships is not just important for us individually, it’s also incredibly important for us as a business. The reality is simple…people do business with people they like. In a world with billions of people, chances are the services and products you offer are in competition with someone else and their business, for all intents and purposes is the same as yours. How then do you make sure you win the business? The answer here is also simple, by making sure you’re damn good at building relationships. Ultimately, this factor will determine winning the business or standing on the sidelines more often than any other metric. If winning business is all about forming relationships, we need to get really sharp at this. We have some tips below. Forming relationships doesn’t start with you, it starts with them People are self-interested. That’s natural. Putting someone else first goes against that. But, if you want to form relationships and get really good at it, you need to put someone else first. Do that and you’re lightyears ahead of most other people. The relationship is 100% on you You’ll hear people say that relationships require both people to put in equally. We’d argue that you need to forget expectations and put in 100%. If a relationship grows and blossoms or shrivels and dies, that’s on you. Put in 100% and get 1000% back. Put in anything less and good luck. Relationships form based on shared interests You could spend hours, days, months and years trying to develop relationships with anyone you meet. That’s a recipe for disaster. Be realistic. People are perceptive and they’ll be able to read your energy. When you’re forming a relationship with someone, or a business, that you really mesh with, you’ll know it and so will they. Instead of trying to force relationships, you’re better off putting your time into finding relationships that have a solid foundation to grow off of. Plant the seeds where the soil is fertile! Interested in joining the community and other like minded professionals? Come join the movement where we reinvent how business is done and help you #beRICH! You can check it out here. Join our Private Facebook Group
How To Rediscover Your Passion
We don’t believe passion is undying and continuous for most people. It doesn’t just keep going and going and going. Passion like a lot of things in life is cyclical. There are days, weeks, months and years where you will fill the burn of passion and you’ll find great motivation, fulfillment and satisfaction in what you do. There will also be times where you can’t seem to find your passion at all and you may begin to feel lost, unsatisfied, unmotivated. When you end up in that place it can be difficult to get back on your feet and reignite your passion. Here are a few tips to get you started back up! Get away The Doc will repeat over and over again, to change a pattern you need a disruption. When you find yourself losing your passion one of the greatest ways to get it back is to get away. Disconnect from your day to day and welcome a disruption to your normal life. With distance comes fondness and time away may be exactly what you need! Have fun Ever feel like you have stopped having fun? Been adulting too much lately? Passion and joy go hand in hand. If you’re struggling to find your passion and feel that you’ve lost it, take a minute and see if you’ve been experiencing any joy lately. If the answer is no, get back to your roots. What makes you feel joy. Go do it, it might just help reignite your passion as well! Gut Check Rediscovering passion isn’t necessarily always going to lead to passion for the same things that used to drive your passion. We change and life is never static. If you’re struggling to rediscover your passion it could be time for some self-development and growth. Exploration and experimentation are central to a life of fulfilment and satisfaction. If your passion for something is no longer there you may be experiencing a signal that you’re ready to embrace a new, different passion. If you’re looking to join a tribe of like minded professionals that believe in the #beRICH mindset: Rising to Mastery, Inspiring Greatness, Celebrating Knowledge and Helping Others along the way, you’ll want to check out our private facebook group, Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. You can join the movement here! Join Our Facebook Group
Collaboration – The Hidden Benefits
In a hyper competitive world, how do we find success? How do we differentiate, disrupt and displace the existing marketplace and market leaders? One significant method? Good, solid, teamwork. Teamwork develops a lot of very tangible benefits. For example, we are all probably aware that we have strengths and weaknesses. Being on a team means that I find someone who has a strength for one of my weaknesses and I can allow them to take ownership of that activity. Collaboration and teamwork have some other less obvious benefits that are rooted in science and 100% worth mentioning. Collaboration leads to disruption. Did you know that small teams are more likely to create disruptions in various markets? Nature published a study which showed that small teams that collaborated were more likely to uncover different ways to operate and disrupt a market place! You’ll have reduced stress. Yes, relationships take work. Doesn’t matter if it’s a marriage or a partnership or being a team member. With that work comes some seriously understated rewards. In a world where it can feel like we’re drowning in stress, it’s an absolutely under stated benefit to be able to have a team that you trust to take on and share in the responsibility. This can and does reduce stress. Who wants to team up now?! We don’t know what we don’t know! Until you collaborate you’ll be stuck and won’t even be aware of it. Teamwork fosters creativity and gives us access to information we didn’t have and didn’t know we didn’t have. This makes you better. In this instance, having a team, a community, a tribe around you with a common vision will give you access to personal development and growth. Need we say more? If you’re looking to join a tribe of like minded professionals that believe in the #beRICH mindset: Rising to Mastery, Inspiring Greatness, Celebrating Knowledge and Helping Others along the way, you’ll want to check out our private facebook group, Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. You can join the movement here! Join our Facebook Group For more conversation around collaboration listen in to our most recent podcast. We interviewed The Thrive Group’s, John Zentgraf and discussed the power of masterminds and collaboration. Like us, John believes in solving the primary challenge in business today – how we do take a 70% failure rate and make it a 70% success rate in business! Listen in to our conversation here!
An Extreme Benefit of Celebration
What do you think when you hear the word ‘celebration?’ What images come to mind? Is it a birthday party that you first thought of? A wedding or anniversary? Was it a team or personal triumph? Almost certainly, it was a positive event. Likely, something that was incredibly personal and impactful to you and your life. As in most things we discuss, it’s unique to you. Keep thinking about it. Do you remember how you felt? Was anyone there with you? Did the celebration stretch or was it momentary? Keep remembering. Are you feeling good right now? Most of us probably are. When we remember our celebrations and what we’ve celebrated in the past, it brings up good memories. This is important. It’s important to recall the good feelings and memories of a celebration. A celebration is a end result of a journey. Not the end but a slight pause in an otherwise always continuing journey. A celebration, celebrates. It celebrates achievement, victory, progress and growth. We’re going to challenge you to do something different with it. Because, you can’t have a high without a low and no victories come without failures. Achievement isn’t achievement without struggle. Progress and growth can’t happen without backslides and lessons learned. What losses did you face before your celebration? What failures did you overcome? What lessons were learned? Celebration is an amazing thing. It creates gratitude, unifies teams, cements visions and allows us to acknowledge goals being hit. It also, importantly, allows us to let go of our failures. Letting go of our failures is one of the extreme benefits of celebration and we often never even think about it. To be clear, letting go of failures doesn’t mean to forget the failures. Letting go of failure means recognizing that we have failed and overcome. That the sweet taste of victory and achievement is only sweet after the bitter bite of loss and failure. To celebrate is to remember. But don’t just remember the good, remember the entire journey and something amazing will happen. Your future failures, they’ll hurt a little less. They’ll be a little easier to recover from and you’ll find yourself more resilient than you were in the past. Celebrations are opportunities to grow our resilience by recalling the past challenges without the immediacy of the pain and frustration. If you take the time to really reflect on those challenges when you celebrate, your celebration will be all the sweeter and your future frustrations, just a little less disruptive. What’s that really mean? More opportunities to celebrate, more often. And that can’t be a bad thing! To check out our celebration this week inside the Lab, as we have reached our One Year Anniversary of the podcast. Listen to the podcast Please head over to the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab Facebook Page and tell us your favorite memory from the podcast, or perhaps you favorite guest or episode. We would love to hear from you! Join our private Facebook Community Group, The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab ~ A Place for Service Professionals to Give & Grow JOIN NOW!
Masters of Improv: The balance of being deliberate and thinking on your feet
I recently had the chance to join our most recent podcast guest and master storyteller, Jonathan Garber on a short leadership workshop he hosted. True to the spirit of everything Jonathan discussed in our podcast, the leadership workshop had a tremendous amount of value and lessons to provide. What ended up standing out the most, to me, was the reality of public speaking vs the clinical setting we practice in. Allow me to explain. Most of us, when we build out presentations and practice our messaging, do so in a ‘sterile’ environment. Sterile, meaning, an environment very much set up for us to succeed. We’ll likely practice in a quiet spot. We’ll practice what we’re going to say and how we’re going to say it. We’ll practice (if we’re smart) enough to be able to work out what cadence we’d like to use, what words we’ll emphasize and the points that are most important to make. Overall, our practice will be structured in a bubble. Funny enough, reality doesn’t operate in a bubble and it’s rarely as structured as we’d like. Reality is dirty, not sterile. It’s loud. It’s uncertain. How we’ll start, who is sitting down, who is listening, who is distracted, where we will stand, will we have our resources, will the technology work….dirty, dirty, dirty. There’s a number of variables that will come into play and Jonathan, just like his storytelling was able to masterfully illustrate that to a room full of professionals. Stand up. Speak. About anything! Simple instructions. 90 seconds, you’ve got this. Now, your audience has instructions. Some members will be asking questions, some will ignore you, some will distract the others, some will know everything, some will know nothing, all will challenge you. All will dirty up that perfectly sterile environment you prepared for! Preparation is key. Preparation can never be skipped or ignored. And preparation alone, it’s not enough. You need to be able to improvise. When your technology not working, how will you adapt? Audience isn’t all ready when you start the presentation, what now? What will you do when someone steps into the room mid sentence? What do you say when a waiter spills a beverage on an audience member? In these instances, among many others, you need to be able to improvise. Ask someone to list 10 essential skills for a business owner or service based professional. Ask 100 someone’s. How many do you believe would list improvisation? Maybe you’ll be the 1st. You’ll certainly be the best prepared for whatever the world throws at you if you identify this as an essential skill to master. To check out our conversation with Jonathan Garber of Flying Chimp Media – you can listen in here! Listen to Podcast To connect with masters of their craft and other professionals, make sure to join us in The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. You can request access to our private (free!) community on Facebook, here! Join our Free Facebook Group