Is Your Biggest Challenge Your Attitude and Energy?

As I've reiterated before in this book, while talking with many business owners and dedicated many painstakingly long hours of research and interviews, I've found two common issues limit the owner's success: their attitudes about their lives and businesses, and the energy they expend on their businesses.

My objective is to reveal common denominators which cause business owners to struggle with the way they see and react to the world around them. The title of Wayne Dwyer’s book, You’ll See It When You Believe It, speaks volumes and could turn around many lives if its meaning is understood. And I recommend you try to understand the book's message.

When events in your life create negative feelings or when people with whom you interact with every day leave you frustrated, then it’s time to evaluate your belief system. After all, the world around you is just a reflection of your thinking.

Although the term, 'people management' may be inappropriate or the incorrect term, it is a good place to start. As one smart author once wrote: "You manage things; you lead people." Leading people and inspiring them, instead of trying to manage them, creates a better working environment and inspires them to put all their effort into working for the business. Ultimately, they will respect you as a leader, and you will have earned their respect. During the years, I’ve adopted some meaningful metaphors for feeling frustrated when 'managing people'.

·        Accomplishing anything in one’s life (or business) is like 'pushing rope'. 

·        Managing people is like 'herding cats'.

These metaphors may reflect the way you’ve felt many times, and they also indicate an attempt to manage instead of leading. Pushing people to accomplish tasks, to be more responsible or excel is worse than 'pushing rope' since people will push back or resist your attempts to manage them. In either case, pushing people or herding cats are both highly unproductive and won't get you anywhere.

Like me, I am sure you have struggled with the same unproductive mental cycle — irritation, frustration, anger, and then finally, the realization that the only way to lead your organization is by example.

If you want your sales executive to source more or better clients, then lead by example and show them more efficient ways, and tips and tricks you have learned throughout your career to improve their methods. This is how you can improve your sales efforts as your team will then learn from you teaching them the model for success.

The adage: "do as I tell you, not as I do it" neither leads nor inspires anyone and should be directly avoided. Too many business owners find themselves trapped when they lead from the front when training, but still end up pushing their staff to improve business performance while ignoring it themselves and turning a blind eye. It just doesn’t work — and this has been proven time and time again.

Tweaking your systems, writing manuals, or implementing rewards and punishments systems will never fix your failure to lead from the front. Furthermore, if you're assigning staff members to take on the responsibility of managing systems or accomplishing tasks you don’t understand yourself, then this is also a similar failure to lead on your part. As the owner of a company, you must master each of the core processes — marketing, sales, finances, and social media — before you hire a new employee or involve a current employee in the management of these processes, regardless of how well those employees may be able to do the job. 

Sales is a particularly misunderstood and mismanaged process in most businesses. It is not uncommon for owners to feel that selling is beneath them, while never realizing their most important job as an owner is to sell not only the products and services to the customer, but sell the jobs in their business to the potential members of staff and show them they are a fantastic opportunity that will give them great career progression and develop their maximum potential.

Any business person should understand a key mission of their teaching role is to encourage their members of staff to learn new things and progress within the company. There are few of those staff members who would respect a leader who refused to “sell” their products.

Never Stop Learning

·       No matter how much you know, there’s always more to learn.

·       How many non-fiction books have you read this year?

·       Do you take notes when you read?

·       Do you write in the books and jot ideas and implementation strategies?

·       Do you ever re-read a book 2, 3, 5 or 10 times?

·       Do you love Amazon.com or your local Barnes & Noble bookstore?

·       How many biographies have you read?

·       How many audio CDs have you purchased, and then listened to their contents repeatedly?

·       Are you on the Nightingale-Conant preferred-customers list?

·       Do you obtain any industry-specific information that is available?

·       Do you subscribe to all the helpful business tip websites?

·       How many DVDs have you purchased and watched?

·       Do you own the Kovar series?

·       How many business DVDs do you have?

·       Do you go to many seminars?

·       Do you go to every industry-specific seminar?

·       How much would you spend for a seminar? Would $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 or $10,000 be too much? Why?

·       What types of seminars would you and have you attended? Is it time to 'learn outside the box' and explore other subjects?

·       Have you ventured outside of your comfort zone?

·       Have you thought about returning to college?

·       Would a BA, BS, MA, MS or MBA help achieve your goals?

·       Do you have any mentors?

·       How often do you talk to them?

·       Do you know their strengths and weaknesses?

·       How’s your peer networking?

·       Do you talk with at least three people per week who are doing something better than you?

·       Do you share and obtain ideas regularly?

·       Do you talk to successful people outside your 'normal' circle of acquaintances?

The most successful people I know do several things religiously:

·       Read the biographies of successful people.

·       Read often.

·       Keep a dictionary on their desks and search for words they don’t know or use consistently.

·       Break from their 'paradigm' to look at things in new ways.

·       Talk to people who are more successful than they are.

·       Listen more than they talk.

·       As soon as you stop learning, you stop growing. Look for new information and always apply it to your business and life. Avoid learning just for the sake of it but apply the information quickly.

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Stephen Oliver’s Wealth Mastery was founded in 1999 (previously also known as Extraordinary Marketing.)   Our program is designed for Financial Advisors and similar professionals to teach them effective sales, marketing, and practice management practices.

We provide a combination of mentoring, coaching, peer support and accountability to grow financial practices utilizing a range of focused and effective marketing and sales processes.

For Financial Advisors we provide a free package of support materials that includes two special reports: “10 things that you must do to grow your financial practice,” “Social Media Marketing for Financial Advisors,”  Along with two of Stephen Oliver’s business growth books: “Everything I Wish In Knew When I Was 22,” and, “The Way of the Mile High Maverick” along with several valuable training videos that include “The Bozo Explosion,” and “Key Growth Secrets for Financial Advisors.”    Receive these free gifts at: https://www.AdvisorWealthMastery.com

You may contact us at:  [email protected] or, by phone or text at 1-303-808-8719.   

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About Stephen Oliver.   Stephen Oliver graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in International Economics, expecting to go onto a Harvard or Wharton MBA then onward to Wall Street.  Instead he ended up in Denver, an started 6 martial arts schools in 36 months.   He ended up with over 2,500 active students and promoted one of the largest martial arts tournaments in the country along with 100’s of other events.   Very early on professionals ranging from Financial Professionals, commercial realtors, lawyers to, of course other martial arts schools sought him out as a consultant on Marketing, Sales, client relations, and staff development.   He completed his MBA in 1992.  His first book in 1999 was on using the internet to market a small business.   Since then, he’s written a number of books on business management, marketing, personal development, and sales and has worked with 100’s of clients on growing their businesses aggressively and effectively.   He’s taught business seminars all over North America and has shared the stage with speakers ranging from former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik to Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy to marketing guru’s such as Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham.  More at LinkedIn:    https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/stephencoliver/