Be Transparent and Be Relatable
We all matter. We all want to be heard. Every one of us has a different perspective from everyone else. How do we make sure that our message is being heard? One of the best ways to be heard is to be transparent and be relatable. Before we discuss how to be relatable, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you you can access it right here. In our most recent podcast, we chatted PR and personal branding with Liana Zavo of ZavoMedia Group. One of the top takeaways from our conversation is that people want to relate. They want to identify with you and they want you to be open with them. Many business owners struggle with finding their voice and then once they have found their voice, finding ears to listen to it! If you’d like to learn how to have more people hear you, you’ll want to listen in to our conversation with Liana. Liana went from a single mom, college drop out to CEO of a global PR firm and a large part of her story focuses on transparency and relatability! You can listen to the episode here. In The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab community, we have tremendous professionals like Liana available to connect with directly. If you struggle with branding, finding your voice or getting your message in front of others you’ll want to get involved with our group. To join our awesome community of rockstars like yourself, request access here! Best of all, it’s free! As business owners and professionals, it’s often difficult to be transparent. After all, being vulnerable is scary. When you find yourself in this struggle, ask yourself what is more scary for your prospects and clients. Is it more scary for your clients and prospects to work with someone that is willing to fully put themselves out there, or is it more scary for your clients and prospects to guess about what you’re truly like? The thing is, people are smart. They know you’re not perfect. They know you have a past. Heck, they can go google it in a matter of minutes and learn all about your background if they’d like to. The hard and simple truth is you can be up front with people from the get-go and you can be honest and you can be relatable, or you can choose not to be. But if you look at it from your clients and prospects perspectives, chances are you’ll recognize that you’re letting your own fear take center stage of addressing a fear of your clients and prospects. Putting yourself in front of the people you serve is almost always a mistake and will almost certainly hurt you more than it helps. If you’d like to earn the trust of your clients and prospects you need to be transparent and you need to be relatable. The next time you struggle with this, remind yourself that it’s not about you, it’s about the people you serve. What is most important to them? It might just help you take that extra step to be even more transparent and relatable. When you do that, you’ll start getting heard even more! If you’re working on being heard and relatable, we can help! Our unique 2 on 1 coaching marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 external regional sales manager. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science
Have some fun or suffer the consequences
As business owners and professionals, it’s quite common to lean towards formality. Having a professional brand, is, if nothing else, professional. It’s also easier than having a likeable brand. But what if I told you that you need to have some fun or you’ll suffer the consequences? Before the fun starts, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you you can access it right here. In the war between likeability and professionalism businesses and professionals typically fall into one of the two camps. In my experience the formal camp of consistent professionalism is the most common to adopt into a business or profession. This is because we can follow a template. Formality, professionalism, and all the social cues that go with it are fairly easily recognizable and implementable. There isn’t much ‘risk’ in being formal. Except, maybe there is. At some point in our lives many of us start losing the ability to have fun. This peaks around 45 years of age but can start much earlier for people. Whether you’re a professional/business owner or a consumer, you’re equally impacted. And having fun matters. Having fun preserves health, increases creativity, reduces stress and leads to a better memory! Companies and people have started to take notice too… In our most recent podcast, we chatted about gamification with Eddie Jimenez of 1Huddle. Gamification requires us to have some fun. It works really well too! If you’re like most people we know, chances are you’d like to be able to be professional, run a great business and have some fun. It’s a safe bet you’d also like your client experience to mirror your own as well. An experience that is both professional AND enjoyable. It’s one of the reasons we really enjoyed our conversation around gamification. If you’d like to learn more about gamification and having fun you can listen to this podcast episode right here! In The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab community, you’re going to find other professionals just like you, these are people that want to have a great business but also want to have some fun as well! To join our awesome community of rockstars like yourself, request access here! Best of all, they are both free! But what’s the risk of not having fun and not using gamification? Being too formal carries risk when you fail to meet your expectations of formality. Sooner or later all businesses do. All business are run by people and sooner or later people will screw up. We’re not robots. When that screw up happens and you only have a formal and professional brand, it hurts! It turns out people and consumers are much more forgiving when you have a brand that is likeable and more authentic. A brand that loosens up the tie and unbuttons the top button of the shirt. It doesn’t mean that consumers don’t expect professionalism, it just means that having some fun in your business and with your clients can go a long way to mitigate some risk.Maybe most importantly, business owners and professionals run a high risk of burnout, unhealthy levels of stress and long running anxiety. Building some fun into your business can protect your brand, enhance your consumer experience, and provide you with some substantial personal benefits too! If you’re working on your brand and your business and need to implement gamification and find some fun again, we can help! Our unique 2 on 1 coaching marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 external regional sales manager. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science
Tips to Eliminate Limiting Beliefs
Limiting beliefs are the thoughts and conviction that act as our glass ceiling. They define what we can accomplish and achieve and their very structure brings us up short of our potential. We all deal with limiting beliefs at some point in our life and if you’re struggling with them now, we’ll offer you some very valuable tips to eliminate your limiting beliefs. Before going any further, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together an absolutely FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our gift to you absolutely free and you can access it right here. Some of the most common limiting beliefs people have start with ‘I can’t’ or words like ‘never.’ Often the limiting beliefs and language people use is a reflection of fear and uncertainty in our lives. We will say words like ‘I can’t’ but what we are really saying is, I am too afraid of what is on the other side of this to actually (insert action). In our most recent podcast we discussed addressing fear. Fear and limiting beliefs go hand in hand. If you’re like many of our members of The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab community, you’re probably not afraid to admit that you deal with fear and your own limiting beliefs from time to time. To listen to our podcast you can check it out here! To join our awesome community of rockstars like yourself, request access here! Best of all, they are both free! Now, for what you have been waiting for… Here are some easy ways to eliminate limiting beliefs so you can help rise to mastery in whatever you choose to do! Figure out where they come from Most limiting beliefs are the result of an experience we have in our lives. It’s not unusual for negative experience to begin to define our belief systems and create a whole bunch of BS! If you’re struggling with a limiting belief, try to find out the root cause of the belief. There’s a lot of band aids we can use to help cope with limiting beliefs, and that’s ok, but we’re talking about attacking and eliminating these beliefs, not managing to them! Once you’ve identified the root cause, review the experience It’s been said that our experiences are a reflection of how we interpret what’s going on around us, not what is really happening. To stay on the safe side of the Doc and psychology buffs around the world I’m not going to stray too far out of my lane here. I do feel it’s safe to say that often our interpretation of something that happens is unique to us and we have a choice in how we interpret, react and respond to our experiences. If you can identify a root cause for an experience, congratulations! You now have the power to step away from your original interpretation of the experience and decide if there are other equally as, or more valid than your existing interpretation. And if you can do that, you’ll end up eliminating your limiting belief. Become a pessimist No, I don’t really want you to become a pessimist, but I do want you to consider what the absolute worst case scenario around your limiting belief is. What happens if I….(fill in the blanks). Our worst-case scenarios when we play them out aren’t nearly as bad as we build them up to be. By thoughtfully considering what the consequences of stepping beyond our limiting beliefs could be we can better examine whether these are as ‘bad’ as we originally gave them credit for. Once you have identified the worst-case scenario, then the fun starts and you can consider the best case scenario! The perspective should help break you free of some of your limiting beliefs and what’s holding you back from truly rising to mastery in your life! If you’re working on limiting beliefs and want to master your own belief systems even more, we can help. Our unique 2 on 1 coaching marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 external regional sales manager. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science
Tips For Setting Expectations and Consistent Communication
Go to Disney World and expect magic! Travel to Rome and expect history. Go to an Apple store and expect white, clean tables and crisp technology. The common thread here? We have our expectations set up front. Here are some of the best tips to make sure that you are setting expectations correctly and consistently communicating to your clients and prospects. Expectations are everywhere. Meeting expectations leads to good feelings. We’re comforted that what we anticipated was what we experienced. There is comfort in familiarity and when we have an expectation in our minds, we become familiar with an idea. If that idea, that reality that we are creating in our heads comes to be, we end up being happy! When we exceed expectations and it’s even better than we expected, that’s how you convert people into advocates, raving fans. If you’re a business owner or professional that is trying to refine or even develop your client experience, this article is going to help you identify some top methods you can set expectations and deliver the very best client experiences. Before going any further, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together an absolutely FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our gift to you absolutely free and you can access it right here. In our most recent podcast, Release The (Snappy) Kraken, featuring Greg Drozdow, we take a candid look at communication with our clients and prospects. Greg, like so many of us, is working towards providing the very best consumer experience. We encourage you to listen if you’d like to learn how he’s helping other professionals implement better, consistent, communication to their clients to deliver outstanding experiences. You can listen in here! Tip #1: Let Everyone Know When we know something really well, it’s easy to forget that other people might not. This happens in our businesses too! It’s very easy for us to say, hey, this is how we do things (and you can likely throw in an eye roll, duh, obviously, and so on)…the thing is, for something we are so close to, most people are not. By letting all of your clients and prospects know up front exactly what you will provide and how you will provide it you are creating a very clear roadmap. They’ll appreciate this since they won’t have to put any thought into their expectations, they are being relayed up front. Tip #2: Remind People Most of us are poor listeners and we’re distracted. Often, overwhelmed, rarely focused and usually doing our best to multi-task. You can be certain that most people won’t hear something you say until you say it about 5-7 times. We’ve been doing this a long time and the evidence always brings us back to the same results. If you are not consistently reminding people of the expectations and are not clear in this with your communication, often, they will either not hear you or immediately forget. Make sure your process is set up to remind people throughout the entire process on the what and how. Tip # 3: Do exactly what you say you’re going to do…or MORE People today are so overwhelmed by poor service, poorly set expectations and little to no communication that by simply doing as you say will you set you apart tremendously from the competition. The key is to NEVER, NEVER EVER, over promise on your expectations. We rarely use the word NEVER here in the Lab, in this instance, we do. The biggest mistake people make is not failing to set an expectation, it’s failing to keep to the expectation. Keep to your expectation and/or exceed it and you’ll have very happy clients. Tip #4: Overcommunicate, unless your clients tell you not to Yes, we want you to overcommunicate. That doesn’t mean that we want you to blab on. Nor does it mean we believe you should annoy your prospects or clients. What it does mean is that it’s better to start off with more than less. People will let you know if you’re too much. If they do and you tone it down, it means you heard them and listened. People like that. People will not very often tell you if you’re too little. Instead you’re much more likely to have them simply walk away because you already failed to meet an expectation that they had set in their minds. Tip #5: Be consistent People like things they are familiar with and consistency breeds familiarity. Why do you think so many people enjoy Starbucks or McDonalds? Familiar is comfortable and comfortable is comforting. People do business with people they like. Make people feel good by being consistent. By following these 5 tips you’ll find yourself delivering the very best client experiences. You’ll become proficient, if not an expert at setting expectations and you’ll pave the road for a clear, repeatable, and consistent experience for your clients. By doing this you’ll step up your game, and level up your communication and deliverables for your clients and prospects. If you’re working to develop consistency and set expectations or want to master this skill even more, we can help. Our unique 2 on 1 coaching marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 external regional sales manager. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time,
Managing to Results and Betrayal
You’ll hear coaches and sales leader say all the time to separate yourself from the results. In other words; it’s a numbers game, it’s not about you, don’t take it personally, you’re not being rejected only your offer is, remove yourself, distance yourself, etc and etc so on and so on. The personal saying I’ve used for many years is to ‘divorce’ yourself from the results. Truth bomb time. You cannot separate yourself from results, not completely, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to. Instead, you should manage to your results. Betrayal is the same. It’s something you can’t avoid. Sooner or later, you will take something personally and it will feel like a betrayal. If you’re not careful, betrayal can really sink your ship fast, and it’s why it’s so important to learn how to manage your results and betrayal. Before going any further, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together an absolutely FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our gift to you absolutely free and you can access it right here. Betrayal was front and center in our podcast, The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. In our most recent episode featuring Michael Buzinski betrayal came up and it was personal. Michael ended up shutting the doors of a multi-million-dollar company after experiencing epic level betrayal. Instead of letting it sink his ship, or more aptly, crash his plane, Buzz used it as inspiration to build a business more aligned with his values and his employees. Today he enjoys a thriving marketing business and is President and CMO of Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing. To hear more about how Buzz managed his emotions and the impact of betrayal you can listen in to our podcast here and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and give us a 5* review if you enjoy the episode! Why is it so important to manage our results and betrayal? Because we can’t ever separate ourselves from them. We can’t be emotionless when results aren’t what we want them to be. Every rejection is, to an extent, personal. It’s not like someone else is being rejected after all. This is your experience, and it is real. The old advice about divorcing yourself from the results? It’s not that it’s bad advice, we should be figuring out ways to handle negative results, it’s that it’s impossible. It is impossible to fully separate ourselves from negative results. If that is what you’re trying to do, it won’t get you to where you want to be. We need to manage our reaction to results. This is different than removing ourselves from the results. Think of results as data that we need to get better. Every failure, every rejection is an opportunity to learn and tweak what we are doing to achieve more success. As we love to say, it’s all just an experiment and failure is simply a result that we didn’t want or expect. By shifting our perspective here, we can start to manage to rejection. Rejection is something that we’ll still deal with, but we are going to start using tools that will make rejection more helpful. Your emotions will come into play here. Most people, when they experience poor results or rejection will deal with anxiety, imposter syndrome, fear, anger, frustration, and a whole lot of emotions we paint as ‘bad.’ Let’s get this straight. Emotions are neither bad nor good, they just are. We need to be able to acknowledge our emotions, allow ourselves to feel our emotions and then accept our emotions. In this way we can manage to our results and not try to remove ourselves from them. Again, removing ourselves from our results and emotions, that’s impossible. Managing to them is not! Back to betrayal. It will happen. We will feel betrayed. This is a result that nobody will ask for, but we will all experience. Betrayal and our response to it will determine whether we can step forward into our businesses or shrink away. If you experience betrayal, be like Buzz. Step up and out and use it as an inspiration to build something even greater and stronger. You’ll thank yourself later for it! If you’re struggling with your results, we can help. Our unique 2 on 1 coaching marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 external regional sales manager. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here! Feel like you need coaching but not sure you can afford the investment in yourself? That’s ok! We have a scholarship available to diverse candidates of need. You can apply for our scholarship for our coaching and our courses here. Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.
Affirmations or Ask-firmations how to make affirmations better
Popularized back in the ‘60s affirmations are something TONS of coaches, influencers and even psychologists will recommend their clients practice regularly. There’s science to back up the effectiveness of affirmations, too! After 60 years it’s worth asking, can we make affirmations better and the answer is, yes! Instead of a practice of affirmations, a practice of ask-firmations can make this practice even more effective. Before you read on we thought you might be interested in downloading our free guide: 70% of Entrepreneurs Fail – The 6 methods to make sure it’s your competition and not you! In this guide we walk through the most common ways professionals fail and most importantly provide you with immediate action items you can implement to make sure you’re ahead of your competition and successful! You can download the free PDF here. Affirmations are positive phrases or statements used to offset and challenge negative thoughts or beliefs. For those of us caught up in negative self-talk or looking to raise our self-esteem or create a more positive narrative of ourselves affirmations can be incredibly helpful. Research done in the 1980s as well as the last couple of decades shows the positive benefits of affirmations. They help to drive our self-identity and regular, consistent use of affirmations can shift how we think of ourselves. Talk about a powerful tool. After 60 years of popularity, it is worth exploring if simple affirmations can evolve and if we can level up the results we get from this practice. I first heard of ask-firmations from Coach Machen Macdonald, who joined us on our podcast. If you would like to hear him talk about ask-firmations you can head over to our podcasts here. Ask-firmations are another way of saying an affirmation. A traditional affirmation likely will have a clear formula of: Visualized and present tense, declarative sentences. For example: Today I am experiencing tremendous gratitude and am drawing my ideal clients to me. An ask-firmation on the other hand will rephrase this into a question formula: visualized and present tense, interrogative sentences. For example: How can I experience tremendous gratitude today and draw my ideal clients to me? Coach Machen isn’t the only one talking about ask-firmations, however. In one of my favorite sales books out there – To Sell Is Human, by Daniel H. Pink, Pink mentions the strength of ask-firmations. Both Coach Machen and Pink establish clear and logical rationale for an ask-firmation instead of an affirmation. Ultimately, affirmations are build me up declarations and ask-firmations are questions. The difference in how our brain reacts to being told vs being asked is immense. In sales, telling isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s not all that effective. The best sales tools use good questions. This is because people respond MUCH BETTER to questions than they do to being told. What’s true about other people is also true about us. Asking ourselves a question about how we are going to make our traditional affirmation happen, does something to our brains. It makes us problem solve! By asking ourselves a question we are much more likely to try to reason out ways we can achieve our affirmation. If our affirmation is to experience gratitude and draw clients to us, we will start thinking about HOW we can experience gratitude and in what ways can we help our clients find us. The difference can be startling, and we encourage you to try this methodology out. Run an experiment and see if it’s a change that benefits you. For more direct help with changing your behavior and your mindset you can always contact us directly for our 2 on 1 coaching. This is a truly unique coaching paradigm marrying behavioral modification expertise with blue-blood sales and presentation expertise. You can contact us here! If coaching is on your bucket list but you’re concerned it’s not something you can afford, that’s ok! We offer scholarships to deserving individuals. You can request us to review you for a scholarship right here! Not a member of the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab yet? For direct access to JB, The Doc and a ton of other professionals you can connect with us personally in the EML, our FREE, private Facebook community.
How to find and grow your confidence
Business professionals today struggle with any number of challenges. Time and again we hear from professionals struggling with their mindset and getting the trash out of their own heads. Confidence plays an absolutely central role to our mindset and if you are struggling with challenges related to your head-space then learning how to find and grow your confidence is a great process to work through! Developing confidence leads to all sorts of benefits beyond addressing the specific challenge you are facing. It can help improve our health, our relationships, our happiness, sense of self-worth and performance. It can reduce our anxiety, fear, FOMO and the impact of rejection. Self-confidence is the spark that starts the engine, without confidence there is no action. Our favorite way to think of confidence is the line in the sand between where we are and risk. We are all aware that we need to take action and action and change lead us to risk…and reward! What stops us from taking action? Confidence. Confidence is either the fence that prevents us from taking action or it’s the gate that opens and allows us to cross to a new universe of opportunities. This is why confidence is so important to us! Finding our confidence sounds simple and easy. Like most things in life, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to do. Commonly, we get in our own way with our confidence. Whether you’re brand new to something and trying to fake it until you make it or you’re a vet that got splashed with a hefty dose of imposter syndrome, confidence is not a constant. In fact, our confidence can and will change in an instant. Think of it almost like a light switch in a room. In an instant, the switch can flip and we can go from bright to pitch black. This is what makes it so important to be able to find our confidence. If we think of confidence like a light switch in a room, then we can also consider that even when the light switches off, our confidence is still there. In fact, if we’re comfortable in that room, we have a pretty good sense of where that confidence is. We can use our instinct and our concrete knowledge to map out the room…ok here’s the desk, I know the chair is over here, the other door is over there, oh, here’s our buffet…ok, got it, this is where my confidence sits! How do we find our confidence? We go back to our fundamentals, our most concrete knowledge. Drawing ourselves back to square one and retracing our steps does an amazing thing. It creates perspective on our progress. It allows us to remember a starting point and connect the dots between that starting point and where we are today. When we begin to connect the dots and visualize our progress we remember our confidence. That room that was pitch black with the lights off, now has a dimmer switch. The more dots we connect, the brighter the light gets in the room and the easier it is to grab a hold of our confidence. You may already have some illumination (pun intended) on growing your confidence. Progress develops confidence. Knowledge, mastery and experience grows our confidence. Feeling confident right now? Hit reset in your mind and treat today as if you’re at the start line all over again. What progress can you start making right now to grow and develop even greater confidence? Put an action plan in place to continue pushing your progress and watch your confidence flourish. Interested in hearing what great confidence sounds like? You can listen in to our most recent podcast with Tyler Foley, here, as the inspiration for our conversation about confidence. If you’re trying to find or grow your confidence, we can help. We offer one , two hecks of a value proposition with our 2-1 coaching. We bring business and behavioral expertise to help you evolve to your greatest potential. You can learn more about our coaching here! Trying to get the benefits from coaching but can’t stroke the check? That’s ok, let’s put our ego’s aside. We offer scholarships to deserving candidates and you may be one! You can apply for a scholarship for our services right here. If you just want to get a better feel for us, we get that too! Join us in our private Facebook community, The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab and meet like minded professionals and engage with us directly. You can request access to this free community, right here!
Finding and developing context in your conversations AND Asking the right questions
Finding and developing context in your conversations is at the heart of the biggest riddle anyone in sales can face….what are the right questions to ask? Asking good questions is an art form. Speak to any master salesperson and in today’s world, it’s not about slick talk, it’s about meaningful questions. Ask someone a meaningful question that gets them thinking and you may just open their eyes to a problem they didn’t know exist, or at the very least, key in on the true issue at hand and the real problem that needs to be solved. In Humble Inquiry, Edgar and Peter Schein attempt to provide us with a guide to asking good questions. As someone in sales that has always wanted to know what the ‘right’ questions were, this was an incredibly helpful book. After all, how many books out there really train you on how to ask good questions? It’s generally not the most popular topic people are talking about. It may end up being one of the most important books to read as a business owner, however. In a day and age where sales has evolved from being an offensive game to one of collaboration and partnership, asking good questions is the ultimate consultant move. To be clear, this isn’t to say I loved the book, that would be a lie. It felt and read a little too clinical and technical for my taste. Still, there were some tremendous insights in the book that are worth sharing, especially around context. Context is brought up in the book from many perspectives, and, rightly so! Here are the primary areas of context that are especially helpful to a service-based professional or business owner. 1. Why am I asking this? It’s easy to ask questions. We’ve been doing that since we were kids. Asking the right questions that will elicit an informative response from our clients and prospects is an art form. The first step in gaining expertise in the art of question asking is to ask yourself first! Yup, that’s it, right there. The very first question to ask is internally, to yourself. Why am I asking this? If your answer is internal and not external (about you and not about them) you need to pause and re-think whether it’s the best question to ask. 2. Why are they asking me this? What’s really behind their question. Is it what they are asking? Often times the questions we are asked to respond to are not the questions that will address an issue at hand. Technical questions are a great example of this. Most of the time the technical information being asked for is easily accessible, who doesn’t have google, after all? Answering here will still help address something directly, you just need to consider what’s the driving force behind the question and is that really a technical issue or is it something wholly different and greater that needs to be answered. In short, the Schein brothers ask you to ask ‘why?’ In a world where it’s very easy to speak fast and barely listen, it’s time to step back and consider the context of why we are asking a question and why a question is being asked of us. Why? To help you get better at what you do! Serving others and guiding them to make great decisions! If you’re looking for more insights and help with some of your challenges, be sure to check out our podcast! Once a month we offer a podcast where we answer questions directly from members of the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. You can check out the podcast here! If you aren’t a member of the lab yet and want to join, it’s free, and designed with you at the center of it. You can request access here. Many of the people we work with find us through referrals and our content. If you’d like to contact us directly you can reach out to us via our website at our contact page. Others, want help but don’t feel like they can afford it. Don’t let that stop you…we offer full scholarships to our courses and coaching to deserving and diverse candidates. If you’re on the fence, take a few minutes and tell us about yourself on our scholarship page!
Keys to Resiliency in Business and Sales
Almost all of us sell. If it’s not actively selling a product or a service, it certainly may be to persuade or shift someone’s decisions or behaviors. Don’t believe me? Next time you care about where you eat or how you spend your free time with family or friends, pay attention to how the interaction plays out. Either you or whomever you were planning with sold or were sold on the decision. To persuade is to sell and to persuade is human and natural. To effectively sell, we must be resilient. We’ll talk about some of the keys to resiliency in business and sales today. Key 1: It’s not about you… Seriously. It’s easy to get technical and focus on specific words, phrases, what people respond well to or not. That’s also important. But not as important as remembering that to persuade and to sell is all about the other person. Why would THEY want to do whatever you’re asking of them? When it comes to resiliency and rejection this is one of the most important things to remember! If you’re rejected, if you get a no, it’s not about you. Is this true all of the time? No it’s not true all of the time. It is true most of the time. Often it has nothing to do with you and you end up putting that on yourself. So our key here? It’s not about you so it’s time to stop making it personal. Key 2: No has a short half-life… No is a temporary status. It’s a moment in time. A specific point of rejection based in the present and just as quickly gone as we move forward to the future. We don’t intend to get all metaphysical and it is important to remember that a no in the present is based off of circumstances that will be different in the future, guaranteed. Because life is never static and it’s always changing. It’s easier to be resilient about the ‘no’ when you remember that. One of the best keys to being resilient in business and in sales is to understand that a no in this moment can be a yes in tomorrow’s moment. Key 3: Everyone has a problem to solve… Yep, you read it right. We all have problems to solve. Nobody’s life is perfect, and nobody is eternally happy. Every day life throws at us new challenges, problems, and issues. Some of these are short lived and others are monster issues we need to devote time and energy to solving. Often, when it comes to rejection and developing resiliency it’s helpful to remember that whatever we are offering helps someone solve a problem. It’s a belief and an intimate conviction that what you’re offering is of true value and service for someone else. Failure to keep up this conviction is a certain way to undermine your own personal credibility. Success at reminding ourselves of this conviction leads to sky high levels of resiliency. So how do you apply this when you’re facing rejection? Remember that not everyone is your ideal audience! Not everyone is putting the same weight on the issue that you perceive it to carry (see key 1). Not everyone is ready in the moment (see key 2). Find the right people with the right problem at the right time and you’ll have greater success. We need resiliency when we are looking for the ideal clients we serve and/or are speaking to someone who isn’t a true ideal client. If you need help with resiliency, you’re welcome to contact us about our unique 2 on 1 coaching. We can help change how you perceive and respond to rejection and implement correct process and routines FOR YOU. You can check out our services here. Sure you need help but not sure you can afford for us to help you? Not every investment requires money. We offer scholarships to deserving entrepreneurs and service based professionals. Learn how a short investment in your time could lead to a full ride for our coaching or courses. Check out our scholarship here. Ever wonder where we come up with our topics? Go no further than our most recent podcast with Erich Ko of Hop In Technologies. He and his co-founder Boyd showed true resiliency in how they built Hop In Technologies and our conversation explores how and why this was so important to their success!
The Benefits of Maximizing Connections and Why We Don’t
Maximizing connections is about building a deeper, more meaningful relationship with those around us and creates a level of trust and a rooted desire to give back and care for one another. If you google maximizing connections there’s about a dozen articles around HOW TO build a connection. Most of us already know how to do this, we learn it at a very young age. We simply choose NOT to do it. In this blog we’ll explore the primary benefits of maximizing connections and the most common reason we see people avoid it. The how to, we’ll let the other articles rehash. The benefits of maximizing our connections with other people are significant. A deeper connection establishes intimacy and trust and invites someone into our inner circle or sanctum. In other words, they become like family. They know and we know that we have each other’s backs. It’s like that old saying, “a good friend will bail you out of jail, a great friend will be sitting right beside you.” With increased levels of intimacy and trust comes a bond we rarely see in most of our connections with people today. It’s a level of familiarity and community that allows us to open ourselves up to give and receive. Business, it turns out, is not very different than the rest of life. We spend time, care for and take care of the people we like better than the people we don’t like. The more someone knows you, the more they will feel deeply for you, because they can trust you and that leads to better results in the relationship and the benefits of the relationship. That means more resources, business, referrals, time, energy, grace, understanding and defense! All pretty awesome things to have! Likewise the more you know someone the more you’ll be willing to ‘go to bat’ for them. Maximizing our connections to people means we GET MORE! If we recognize this, then how come we don’t establish deeper connections with other people? We believe the primary reason is vulnerability. Maximizing our connections with people requires making ourselves vulnerable and we have thousands of years of evolution protecting ourselves from becoming vulnerable. It takes time, effort, energy and some risk to make ourselves vulnerable and it’s incredibly difficult to do. Yet, like many things in life, the difficult thing to do are relatively simple. By making yourself vulnerable in front of someone, you open the doors to a part of you that is more intimate. You establish trust and you offer an olive branch to the person across from you. This in turn creates a comfort and familiarity that allows them to be more open and vulnerable with you! It becomes a growing pattern, a Fibonacci sequence, of greater and greater trust, down to the most intimate parts of ourselves. Beyond vulnerability, maximizing connections requires, time, energy and a sacrifice. It means putting someone ahead of ourselves. Selflessness is hard, sacrifice is hard. Easier to never make real connections, right? Of course, It is! Great results never come easy, neither do great connections! For help with maximizing your connections with the people around you, check out our coaching services. We can offer you a number of ways to better prioritize this aspect of your life. You can take a look at our services, here! To listen in on our most recent podcast where we discussed the power of connection with our guest, Monique Russell, you can hear all about her thoughts here! Want coaching but not sure you can afford it? That’s why we offer scholarships to deserving entrepreneurs and professionals. Share something about yourself (yes, get vulnerable) and you might be eligible for a partial or full scholarship for our services! Check our the submission form here!