Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Making Life Easy
I realize that this week's posts seem to be centered on technology. But as a business owner it is imperative that you discover, and start using any and all tools that allow you to get to the most important part of your business, as quickly and effortlessly as possible. What is the most important part of your business? Getting and keeping customers. While you don't get paid to select the best computer or office equipment, making good selections can make your life easier. The last thing that you need in a busy day is to have your computer stops working, or for you to experience problems with your software. Today I'd like to talk to you about an incredible new tool that elimnates the potential of computer problems, and will help you get through the administrative tasks quickly. These improvements will allow you to move on to finding new customers or providing service to your customers, the acivities that you ultmately do get paid for..
Microsoft Windows 7 contains within it a powerful speech recognition technology. It's like having a secretary taking down dictation for you. All of your correspondence, forms and e-mail is all so much easier to deal with when you have a powerful speech recognition tool available. I'm using an inexpensive gigaware a USB stereo headset (which is Skype certified) and the powerful new Microsoft Office 2010, in combination with the speech recognition tool available in windows 7. Set up was easy and the microphone performed well.
So now I can type as fast as I can talk. Which frankly, as much faster than I am capable of typing. It's amazing to watch these words appear on the screen, exactly as I intend them to. If you've ever used speech recognition in the past, you'll have to agree that it could be a bit difficult. The computer didn't always recognize the words you meant to say, leading to typos that took too much time to go back and correct. But you'll find that the new speech recognition technology is amazingly accurate right out of the box. And of course, you still have the opportunity to teach your computer how you speak. As you go through the process of teaching your computer your speech patterns, as well as making corrections in text as you speak it, the computer is less likely to make errors. You'll find with today's new technology that you will not be as frustrated as perhaps you were in the past. There is absolutely no reason to put off the decision of investing in the use of speech recognition technology any longer.
Life and success really are all about choices. And ultimately that comes down to two fundamental choices. Those choices are; 1) what do I need to do to get the results that I desire? 2) can I make choices and be happy with the results I'm getting? "Success is nothing more than choosing to do the right thing, at the right time, consistently." What is the right thing? The thing that produces the results you want. When is the right time? Now! So you can continue to say use the old fashioned way and either type correspondence out yourself, or hire a secretary to do it for you (which I highly recommend, as an assistant can do so much more for you), if it's in the budget. Or you can make a small investment in today's new word processing and speech recognition technologies.
Coach Frits
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Getting What You Want
For Business Owners, Coaches, and Sports Coaches
It's not what you know… it's what you do with what you know that makes the difference. Success is nothing more than doing the "right" things, at the right time, consistently. How do you know what the right things are?
One of my friends just shut down his business this week. And it's okay. He had come to the conclusion that he was investing his time engaged in the wrong activities. He knew that he could count on experts like me to turn his business around, but he finally had to admit that even if his business was running on "all 8 cylinders," he still wouldn't be happy. It wouldn't serve the things, or principles, that he valued most. He asked me to help him build a business that would serve
those values best. What's the lesson here?
You've probably all heard the cliché defining failure as climbing to the top of the ladder, "only to find it leaning against the wrong wall." Just because you build something, or "climb to the top" of something, or even accomplish something as simple as attracting one more customer or making one more sale, doesn't mean that you'll profit from it. Not unless certain fundamentals are addressed
1) Get Clear on What You VALUE most.
Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you building this business? What do you value most?
For example, some of my values include family, financial freedom, and service. These values, along with seven others constitute my "standard" against which I evaluate all activities. Because of this, I'm able to choose the best activities that help me to serve those values. For example, if I'm presented with an opportunity that doesn't allow me to ultimately enjoy more quality time with my family, I will move on to a better choice that does.
I think the Rotary Club's "standard" is a great example of getting clear on what you value most, "Four Way Test." The test, has been translated into more than 100 languages (and is recited all over the world at the beginning of a Rotary Club meeting). And no one can argue with the great things that Rotary has done for communities around the world. It even seems, at times, that the members of that club could move mountains. The "Test" asks the following questions:
Of the things we think, say or do…
1. Is it the TRUTH?
2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?
3. Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
What are the values that you "test" your business performance and opportunities against? Are your most important values being served by the activities that you engage in? If those values are being served, then you are experiencing incredible joy when engaged in your work. You can't wait to get up and "get to work" every morning. If those values aren't being served, well then you dread your work.
2) Get Clear On What YOUR TIME is Worth.
I love the quote "If you don't establish what your time is worth, you leave it to others to decide what your time is worth."
Most people will compensate you with as little as they can get away with. After all, their first responsibility is to see to the needs of their family, right? When you get clear on what your personal time value is, you make it easier to communicate that value to others. Not only that, but you make it easier to choose who you want to do business with. And yes, Virginia, you do get to choose who you do business with. Additionally, when you get clear on your time value, you have another standard to measure your potential activities against. The activities that match your accurate time value, would be the "high value" activities of your life.
If you struggle with getting clear on your time value, a Coach can help you recognize many qualities, skills and characteristics that you possess even help you improve them. These are all assets of real value to the customers that you want to work with, the customers who value you the most.
EDITOR'S NOTE: We have a simple "Time Value Calculator" that we will e-mail to you, free of charge. Request it at CoachFrits@gmail.com
3. Get Clear On What YOUR SUCCESS Looks Like
You've probably all heard the story of the American businessman attending a business convention on the coast in Mexico. Bored with his meetings, he decided to take off his shoes, roll up his pant legs, and take a stroll on the beach. On his walk, he came upon a Mexican fisherman coming in with his day's catch.
Eyeing the bounty in the fisherman's boat, the businessman complimented the fisherman on his catch, and asked what he would do with the fish. "Oh, I will take them home, cook them for my family, and give the rest to friends. After a good meal, I will play with my kids, lay in my hammock, talk with my wife, and enjoy life" answered the fisherman.
Upon which the businessman suggested that the fisherman sell some of the fish, save the money and buy another boat. "What would I do then?" asked the fisherman. "You'll catch more fish, leaving more to sell. That will give you more money until you have bought a fleet of boats. You'll catch enough fish to sell to hotels and restaurants, and build a cannery to sell fish north of the border. You'll build a multi-million dollar business."
"What would I do with that?" asked the fisherman.
"You would sell the business, and be a very wealthy man" was the businessman's reply.
"What would I do with all of that money?" asked the fisherman again.
"Well, then you could spend time with your family, enjoy life." the businessman answered, as the fisherman stared at him, dumbfounded with the businessman's lack of understanding, before walking off with his catch.
The fisherman knew what he wanted, and knew how to achieve it, without going through unnecessary efforts, that would only serve to complicate life. He knew what success looked like in his life. He recognized that he had already achieved that success. To paraphrase a question often asked today, "Do you want the trappings of success, or do you want to be happy?" If you don't know what your success looks like, before you begin looking for it, you might just walk right past it. Like many wealthy people I've known throughout my life, you'll be on a lifelong quest of chasing "it," without knowing what "it" really is. That's a life of unending dissatisfaction.
Answer the following question…
If you had complete success, what would your life look like; where would you be; who would you be with, and what would you be doing? As in the story of the fisherman, you may discover that you already have everything that you desire.
So you say you're already clear on these 3 critical issues? Or you're committed to getting clear on them, and you want to know what's next? You admit that your challenge is taking the action that is needed to achieve your vision of success?
Here's good news. You don't need more will power. All you need to do is to "reprogram" your mind. When your computer stops working efficiently, you don't just throw it away, do you? You will probably upgrade some components like the hard drive or the memory, much like a good Coach can help you to upgrade your skills. But you will probably also "reformat" the hard drive (erase the stuff that's slowing the computer down), and then install a new operating system. And a good Coach can help you do that as well.
ANCHORING TECHNIQUE
Tony Robbins (I recommend all of his books to you; great investments), teaches that we do things for one of two reasons: 1) avoidance of pain, or 2) pursuit of pleasure. If you're avoiding something, it is generally because you perceive great pain in the doing, and/or great joy in the not doing. Rather than try to "muscle" your way through the pain, why not change the way you think and find great pain in the not doing and great pleasure in the doing? This is one of the ways we allow success to be as easy as it can be.
One other note; the "success image" that you'll develop will come into physical reality for you. The first time I used this technique (in my 20's), my success image involved a 20' Christmas tree in the foyer of a grand home. I enjoyed that 20' Christmas tree in that exact foyer, just as I had "experienced" it in my anchoring, about 20 years ahead of schedule.
First take the time to create the ultimate "failure image." It must be painful and believable. Since I could never imagine myself in jail, my failure image consists of me in a very bad nursing home. I'm in a wheelchair with a food tray clipped in, in front of me. I can feel the tray digging into my forearms. I can feel the blanket bunching up underneath me. I can smell the fact that I've been wearing the same pajamas for three days now. I can hear the sounds of a bad nursing home, smell the smells, and taste the "blandness" of the food. For your image to work, you have to have enough detail to be able to experience all of the senses. The mind is a powerful thing. If the mind experiences something in detail, it's as if it really happened.
Now, take the time to create the ultimate success experience. You should have already accomplished that in the exercise above. For me now, it involves standing on the veranda of my home on the beach in Sunset. Wrapped in the arms of my beautiful wife, enjoying the setting sun, the smell of the ocean, the light breeze and the dolphins swimming by... (I'll spare you the rest of the details, but your image must be in complete detail). For your image to work, you have to have enough detail to be able to experience all of the senses. See it, touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Schedule your "high value" activities. When you find yourself "avoiding" any activity, or are reluctant to engage in it at the exact appointed time, follow this exercise…
1. Place a rubber band around one of your wrists beforehand (if you're right handed, I recommend putting the rubber band on your left wrist). Imagine a screen to your left, 15 degrees above the horizon. "See" yourself avoiding the activity. Experience the "failure" image fully, feel the pain of it. See a stop sign in your mind's eye and say "Stop," either quietly or out loud, then snap the rubber band against your wrist. Repeat this cycle a second time.
2. Now imagine a screen to your right, 15 degrees above the horizon. Then see yourself engaged in the activity, in a positive way. Watch this movie in bright colors, you and others smiling. Then experience your success image (notice I said EXPERIENCE, not ENVISION, meaning engage all of your senses), in full detail. Then snap your fingers, or clap your hands. Repeat the process a second time. Eventually, all you'll need to do is snap your fingers or clap your hands and you'll be in the state that allows you to act with confidence and joy. We refer to this as "Immediate Performance." A professional in any endeavor must perform to their highest level when required, regardless of how they feel, emotionally or physically. This is how to accomplish this consistently.
So, what are you doing now? Are you sitting there thinking, "Hmmm, good stuff?" Are you making plans to try this out? Or, are you making a difference in your life, the lives of your family and your customers by already doing something with what you've just read?
It's not what you know… it's what you do with what you know that makes the difference. Success is nothing more than doing the right things, at the right time, consistently. A great way to know what the right things are, is to hire a Professional Business Coach. Or, order a copy of "How To Market Your Crap When The Economy Is In the Toilet at by emailing me at CoachFrits@gmail.com. Or request to get on the early release list for my new book "Just Give Me 5 Minutes."
Your friend,
Coach Frits
"Success Is As Easy As We Allow It To Be"
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Here’s a Great Profit Improvement Tool – Part 2
As an update that underscores the ease of use and versatility of this tool, I want to report that I have made 22 new blog posts in under an hour. Pretty cool. So let's consider how this tool saves you the added expenses of upgrading your office computer system or systems.
Forget the fact that software now costs more than the computers that we're buying, the biggest expense of a new computer system in the office is learning to use the new productivity tools, especially if you are the only "employee" of your Small Office/Homes Office based business. If you aren't familiar with "opportunity cost," it is simply defined as the possible profits that you could have earned by using a resource differently; in this case it's the resource of time that we are considering. As the only employee of your company, you need to be busy doing whatever it is that customers pay you for. If you don't have enough customers yet, then the most valuable activity that you can be engaged in is Selling. Even if you are a tech support company, your time is best spent fixing other people's computers, or improving other businesses computers, rather than working on your own computers. There is a legend that great businessman Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic (known as the god of manufacturing," I'll post his story later) once walked into one of his manufacturing plant offices and saw a "computer" sitting on an employee's desk (it was actually the monitor). Legend has it that he picked up the "computer" and in front of his astonished staff walked to a window and threw it out. He proclaimed that "computers do not work, people do." I am certain he was aware of the power of the computer, but he wanted to make the point to his employees that they could get bogged down. Certainly, the learning curve of a new system is just like that. Some of you may remember WordPerfect, after they took over WordStar's market (yes anyone who remembers WordStar and Lotus, and even Word Perfect is as old as Steve Jobs and me. Of course I remember when word processing was an electronic typewriter with a small 1x4 lcd)? If you do, you'll remember how we had a new learning curve. We used keyboard templates, and competing software companies had "WordPerfect commands" capabilities wherein we could switch back to WordPerfect commands because it was too difficult to relearn the new Microsoft commands. It seems almost laughable to today's generation of computer literate workers. But that reality helped us to understand that when new technology was purchased, we had to pay attention to the training element of learning how to use the new equipment.
Today, that challenge is made so much greater as we have to learn how to integrate all of the equipment in our office, while at the same time learning how to get it all to work with the Internet, Networks - both physical and virtual, email and email Clients. It has simply gotten to be too complex. Have you ever felt like you have become the Computer Help Desk or Tech department in your small business? Have you ever felt like tech requirements and technical support (calling up the mobile technicians and paying them to fix a problem that wasn't' there yesterday)is draining your working capital as well as your precious time? The entire Office 2010 suite seems to have the potential of eliminating most of that. Buy Word 2010 (of course, you're already seeing that I would recommend buying the entire suite), and you won't have to go through reading a "Cloud based" service's "help pages" trying to figure out how to get it and your word processor to talk to each other. With the growing cloud computing model, it was time that a software company figured how to simplify all of that for us. Once again; bravo to you Microsoft, for getting it right for us and making it so we can focus on our businesses not our office equipment.
Last, but not least, it seems that Microsoft's marketing department has been working in unison with the Developers, and made "getting Office 2010" as east as using it. The new pricing model is in line with our needs as small to medium sized business owners. In addition to being a more affordable pricing model, Microsoft has made it possible to "try it, before you buy it" buy allowing free downloads of the Office 2010 beta. The new suite of tools is scheduled to arrive on store shelves in June, 2010. I strongly suggest that you download it now, and see if you aren't as excited about its features as much as I am.
Here’s a Great Profit Improvement Tool
If you're like me and millions of business owners around the world, you are trying to use "Social Marketing" to your advantage. In your Social Marketing mix, you probably have a blog that you manage, just like this one. I manage 12 Blogs, along with 2 Social sites. That would seem a giant task, too large for anyone to manage. I'm no "superman," I have just found tools and advisors that help me, and I'd like to share one of those great tools with you.
Microsoft Word 2010
This may read like a tech page, but believe me, it's a very important part of our businesses toady. I strongly encourage you to read this to the end, unless you're already a raving fan of the new software, and are pretty confident with it's new features. Why didn't I refer to the entire set of work productivity tools now named Microsoft Office 2010? A great new marketing approach by Microsoft is that they will offer each Office 2010 product as a standalone application. So now, if you choose, you can buy just Microsoft Word 2010 by itself. Additionally, the entire suite of products is being offered under some great new pricing models. Along with "Upgrade," you'll also find "Card Key" which allows you to unlock pre-installed Office 2010 software when you buy a new computer. Lately, software prices have been higher than some new computer prices.
I am so excited about the tight integration and ease of use of Office 2010 that this may appear to be a Microsoft commercial, or ad. I assure you that I am not on Microsoft's payroll. Why am I so excited? I was just complaining to my wife how computers and software require a technical level of expertise to "keep it all working." Microsoft is changing all of that. A new standard is coming back to the tech industry. That new standard will only bring us, as consumers and businesspeople, ever improving ease of use and reliability standards we could only dream of (wait 'til you see how easy it is to set up your e-mail accounts in Outlook 2010 – but that's another story).
You will marvel at how easily you can link all of your blogs to Word's new "Blog Post" feature. No more "running around" the net logging into your one or many blogs. You're in control from the "Blog Post" tab in WORD 2010. Gone are the days when you had to learn different ways to spell check or format your bog post when using different service providers. All of the spell check, insertion, formatting and other features that you've become so comfortable with; are now all available to you when you're typing that next blog post. This is all possible from within the comfort of Word. Have you ever experienced the frustration of "fixing" spelling errors, or formatting errors, only to lose the entire document because your blogging server timed you out? That won't happen with Word, because the only time you will interface with the server is when you click on "publish." Combined with the power of your voice recognition capabilities, it won't get any easier until Microsoft figures out a way for us to think it and get it on the page. It's that good. More in the next blog.
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