Reflection – Do’s and Don’ts to get the best results!
Reflection allows us to enhance our decision making, gain clarity on our future goals and identify opportunities for improvement in our process and our behaviors. It’s a crucial skill to develop if your aim is to achieve the best possible results. But if you’re going to do it, you want to do it in a way that will help you achieve the very best results and returns for the time spent. In this blog we’ll discuss reflection and what you should do and should avoid to get the very best results. If you’re reflecting… we have a tool that may be useful! 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! So what is reflection and what are the main do’s and don’ts you should be aware of? Reflection Reflection is a tool to help make more informed decisions in the future. To reflect we must carefully analyze and review our past decisions, experiences and behaviors and then review the outcomes to gain better insight and understanding. It’s a phenomenal tool to assist in continuous innovation and improvement. The Do’s of reflection Just like there are things we should do during reflection there are things we shouldn’t! Take care to avoid doing these three things! Self-criticism Although it’s easy to beat ourselves up over poor decisions or outcomes we didn’t want, it’s more self-sabotaging then effective during reflection. Avoid being overly critical and try to remain objective to get the most from your reflection. Rush Reflection takes time and we should be deliberate in the process. Rushing through reflection will seriously handicap the results you can expect from the exercise. Fall prey to confirmation bias A dangerous habit many people (especially those that are most introspective) fall into is confirmation bias. It’s common for us to want to cherry pick information that conforms to a result we want to have. Be as objective as possible during reflection to avoid this bias! Reflection is yet another skill that every professional and business owner should take time to refine. It will help inform better decisions in the future and force a state of improvement and innovation. What have your experiences with reflection been like? Let us know your thoughts, you can email us 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 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.
Implementing Regular Reviews
One of the most common opportunities that professionals can take advantage of more consistent and effective reviews. If you’re wondering why we are talking about reviews in the first week of January, it’s because we set our sights on moving forward in the start of the year but the best way to keep that momentum going is to also look back on a regular basis. Today we wanted to offer a way to implement effective, regular reviews. 6 Methods To Make Sure Your Business Doesn’t Fail Before we discuss our tips, 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. Calendar It The best way to implement a review strategy is to put it on the calendar. We recommend at least 1 review day per quarter, or two full days for the first 6 months. This needs to be a blocked day in the calendar the same way you’d treat a vacation. Block it and do NOT make the mistake of booking anything during that day. Know Your KPIs Key Performance Indicators are exactly what they suggest. Make sure that your review includes the activities that are most important to the growth of your business. If you don’t know these already then take a step back and consider what activity really leads to your goals and put something in place that allows you to track it. Re-Center When we move forward it’s rarely in a straight line. Implementing a regular review means recognizing where we have lost track of our true north. It happens to all professionals and is a top reason it takes longer to achieve goals than we think. Reviews are like pulling out a compass and making sure we are moving in the direction we want to. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to find ourselves off track! How do you implement reviews? 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.
Reflect 2021
Reflection is important and It’s the time of year when we naturally pause to reflect. For our blog today we took a look back at the last 12 months’ worth of weekly blogs to pick some of our favorites, in no specific order! We can attribute many of these to podcast guests. Where possible we’ve included the names and businesses of the professionals that directly influenced our blogs! We also included the links to the individual blog articles and our podcast if you’d like to listen to these conversations. Masters of Improv – the balance of being deliberate and thinking on your feet Influenced by Jonathan Garber of Flying Chimp Media “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.” Read here: Masters of Improv Listen here: What does Ross Geller, Black Panther and Jonathan Garber Have in Common? ~ Episode 51 The Influence of Mindset Influenced by Suzanne Taylor of Taylord Consulting “…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?” Read here: The Influence of Mindset Listen here: We‘re Positive that You‘ll Connect with our Convo w/ Suzanne Taylor-King Ready Set Action “Action should never be taken without regard to direction. To say that another way – we believe in thoughtful, intentional, deliberate action. You won’t always choose the best action, but we’d rather have you going 100 mph in any direction vs 0 mph in no direction. Movement requires inertia and inertia requires energy. It takes much less energy to shift direction than it does to get moving.” Read here: Ready, Set, Action Listen here: Ready, Set, ACTION! ~ Episode 31 Setting Goals – Insight from Genesis Games Influenced by Genesis Games of Healing Connections “Big goals, big hairy goals, big hairy audacious goals. Smart goals. Specific goals. Specific and measurable goals. Specific and measurable goals that are actionable. OH MY GOSH. Cut it out. It’s too much. Break all of this down into an end vision and small simple steps that will get you there. Keep your eyes on the individual steps and work backwards from your vision and you’ll achieve your goals. It’s that simple. Not smart, not bhag, not the longest mouthful of words and acronyms possible.” Read here: Setting Goals – Insight from Genesis Games Listen here: G’s to a Great relationship: Goodness, Goals and Genesis Games ~ Episode 22 What Keeps You Up At Night Influenced by Barbara Flynn of People First “We can never be risk free in any aspect of our lives and certainly not in our businesses. Good leaders and entrepreneurs will make risk – adjusted decisions. They’ll try to figure out what level of comfort they have for risk as well as their ability to manage to that risk. Risk always comes down not just to tolerance levels, but also to capacity. Can I afford to take the risk, even if I’m comfortable with it. A risk that could put your business out of business for example, you may be comfortable with taking, but your business does not likely have the capacity to take that level of risk!” Read here: What Keeps You Up At Night Listen here: Risky Business? Not with Barbara Flynn ~ Episode 34