How putting people first leads to business growth
All businesses bloom when you’re solving a problem for other people. This is the heart of every successful business. Yet there are many instances where putting people first becomes a part of the very culture of a business and it can often come with startling results. In this blog article we’ll explore how putting people first can lead to amazing business growth and results. Before we strap in for the weekly blog topic, 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. Access it here! Let’s review some examples of businesses putting people first and how it resulted in amazing business success. Costco When you think Costco chances are you think about the hotdogs, free samples, or loads of pallets before you think of the people. How do they sell those hotdogs for so cheap? However, Costco is well known for its loyalty to its employees and putting people first and it’s made a tremendous difference in their results. Costco not only promotes and develops from within but over 90% of its employees have benefits and are paid well above many other large box store employees. The results are clear as well. Costco not only has higher employee retention rates than their competitors but they also have twice the sales per employee than competitors like Sam’s Club. This has resulted in stunning growth for Costco over the years and is a great example of how putting people first can pay off. Patagonia Known for their great outdoors gear you might not realize how much emphasis Patagonia puts on their employees. Patagonia is so well respected for their employee benefits and putting their employees first that it has appeared on the 100 Best Companies to Work For list by Fortune 6 times! Employee turnover happens to be one of the most expensive challenges businesses face today and Patagonia shows clear results here by having 100% (yes, you read that right) of employees return from maternity leave. Talk about an impressive result! Wegmans If Patagonia impressed you, stand back for Wegmans. Wegmans showed up on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list 22 consecutive years showing tremendous consistency and upholding a strong reputation as an excellent employer. Wegmans doesn’t just stop at employee satisfaction as they are very well known for extremely high customer satisfaction as well. Wegmans has been growing for over 104 years and has shown tremendous success when it enters new markets such as North Carolina or by the fact that its food services alone accounts for nearly 10% of its almost $10 billion in sales. Putting people first is essential for a business. Making it a part of the culture can lead to even greater results. How do you put people first? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us at info@jbandthedoctor.com! If you’re looking for an outside perspective on how best to put people first then take a look at our brand new mastermind and owner advisory boards launching in January of 2024! IVOLVE + THRIVE is a next-level advisory board to help you combat isolation, overwork, and blindspots. If you’re dealing with these challenges as a small business owner, we are here to help! owner advisory boards IVOLVE + THRIVE CLARITY + WORTH + FREEDOM Learn more Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your soft skills 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.
How To Acquire More Skills
Acquiring new skills is essential for long term business success. As the world globalizes and business evolves it is of utmost importance for us to continue to learn new skills if we’re going to stay ahead of the competition. This can include skills like learning new technology, basic communication skills and even technical expertise in different subject matter. But we often get asked what the best ways are to learn new skills, and, in our blog, we explore some simple ways on how you can acquire more skills. If you don’t know what skills to focus on, we have a free gift that you may be interested in! 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. Access it here! Attend Conferences and Workshops Yes, you can find almost anything on YouTube, Reddit and Quora today. However, skill development is much easier when you have an ordered way to learn the skill. Conferences and workshops will give you a structure and a community of other people interested in the same skills as you. They are a great way to learn new skills quickly. Find a Mentor or Coach Great mentors and coaches can help you learn more skills more quickly and effectively than trying to do it on your own. Mentor’s can show you how they picked up skills and the lessons they learned. Coaches can help facilitate your skill development by raising your awareness of where there are opportunities to develop new skills or strengthen existing skills. Podcasts, Books and Courses In a world full of resources there is no lack for ways to learn. Finding solid podcasts, books or courses from credible sources are a great way to continue to develop new skills. In a shameless plug we suggest you check out our podcast or some of our courses currently offered! You can check out our podcast here and the link to our course is at the end of the blog. What’s the next skill you want to learn? Let us know at info@jbandthedoctor.com Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. 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.
How to Execute a Plan and Why it’s so Hard to do!
Big goals for 2023, am I right?! Most people don’t set small goals. After all, small goals don’t exactly feel like they will be life altering and exciting. Small goals certainly don’t equate to feeling like you won the lottery. When we develop big goals, the next step is to put a plan in place. Unfortunately, most people are terrible at executing on their plans and implementing them. In this blog we’ll share with you some tips on the best way to execute on a plan and why it’s so hard to do. 6 Methods To Make Sure Your Business Doesn’t Fail Before making any more plans, 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 and you can access it right here. Why is it so hard to execute on a plan Consistency and default behaviors are why we struggle here. Most of us fail to be consistent and this is a top reason why we can’t execute on our plans. Life happens and our consistency goes out the door. What’s really happening here is we are reverting to our default behaviors. Our brains don’t ever forget our defaults. They stay in the back of our minds, lurking and waiting like some creeper. When we get off track it’s natural for our brains to trigger our default modes and behaviors. Just like that, our plan can get off track. Since this is totally natural and impossible to eliminate, it’s very difficult to execute on a plan. Plan Execution, Tip 1 Review the actions that will help you achieve your plan. The only way to manage to our brains defaults is to be aware of when we start to go back to our old modalities and behaviors. The best way to keep up our defense is to review and stay hyper aware of what we need to do to execute on our plan. This means, constant and, yes, consistent review of our days to make sure we are staying on track. A compass works a lot better if we use it every day instead of every few weeks or months! Plan Execution, Tip 2 Embrace the boring. Yes, you read that right. A lot of the time, plan execution requires us to focus on basic and repetitive tasks. While most of us don’t thrive on repeating the same things over and over again with excellence, time and again history has proven that those of us that work the basics the best are the most likely to execute on achieving our larger plans and goals. Are you a rockstar at executing on plans? Let us know at info@jbandthedoctor.com! Did you know we work with professionals and leaders with 2 on 1 coaching that marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 sales executive. 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!
Stop Seeking Comfort
We need to stop seeking comfort and get uncomfortable, now! After finishing up the Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter I took some time to reflect on his message. The book focuses on discomfort and the benefits of being in discomfort. It’s interesting to me that we often couch discomfort as a way to be more comfortable. It seems as if even saying the word ‘discomfort’ is too much for the average person to cope with. Instead, we need to say ‘stretch’ our comfort zone or ‘move outside’ of our comfort zone. It’s not embracing discomfort so much as increasing where we are comfortable. Michael shines a burning bright light on the topic of discomfort, like the full sun in the arctic on the snow (if you read it, you’ll appreciate the analogy). Michael doesn’t just talk about discomfort, Michael inspires with a fantastic mix of science, experience, empirical evidence, and tremendous studies. Michael shares his conversations with everyone from leading geneticists to Buddhist monks and wilderness hunters. One of my favorite takeaways from the book was the idea of the Misogi Challenge. Misogi is a Japanese Shinto practice of ritual of cleansing the body. The ritual is much more than this as is the challenge. The challenge dictates that we need to seek out discomfort. We need to attempt radically hard things. With a 50% chance of success or less. That by experiencing this challenge we completely alter how we perceive time, the world around us, how we respond and react to our everyday problems in life and how we reset our understanding of our own capabilities. This isn’t meant to be an Instagram posted story or a normal competitive event. It’s supposed to be something completely outside of our daily lives and training. Something like say, carrying a boulder under water for a certain distance….chances are you haven’t trained for that. This is a deeply personal and intimate challenge. It’s, by design, for you, not the rest of the world. Yet it can and will change how you interact with the rest of the world. Michael urges us to take at least 1 Misogi per year. Personally, I love the idea of doing something that is so outside the bounds of normal in your life, it will forever serve as a bookmark for you and as a standout in the chapters of your life. If that’s what it means to stop seeking comfort, I’m all about it! For some other ideas on how to find discomfort in your life and the benefits around it, keep an eye on our podcast. Our most recent guest, Daniel Blue, talked about how he used the discomfort in his early life to fuel his business and create the future he wanted for himself and his family. You can check out our podcast here! If you’re looking to change your course and really step it up, we’ve got you covered too. You can always reach out to us for help with 2 on 1 coaching. You can get a better feel for our process, Mastery With Science here. If you’re interested in coaching and are afraid you can’t afford our services, think again! We offer a scholarship for deserving individuals and that may be you! You can take a look at our scholarship and apply here!