Thoughtful Kick Start Podcast

Problems, setbacks and challenges are a part of life and a certainty in business. It’s important to put a structure in place that builds resilience in the face of problems. Without resilience you are more susceptible to having your results and your happiness at the mercy of circumstances which are always changing.

We all do and we all will encounter problems in our pursuit of sustainable success, whether you are a transformational leader of a growth-oriented company, a business development professional working with clients or seeking to advance or transition in your career. A person building a sustainable career or business continues to innovate, grow and thrive through the ups and downs of a changing world. You don’t want to be a flash in the pan.

Here are a few ways to be consistently resilient:

1. Think of your issues as challenges. Challenges bring out the best in you. Finding the solution to a problem is an exciting opportunity.

2. Expect setbacks and problems. Embrace them. After a brief period of being upset, remember that it doesn’t serve you or anyone else to stay upset. If you have something unexpected or unpleasant to deal with, prepare to gather the facts, and re-read item #1 in this blog.

3. Gather the facts. Take the time to really make sure you know precisely what you’re dealing with. Sometimes problems go away when we find out the simplicity of something missing or broken, that when replaced or repaired, does restore workability. For example, a client of mine once turned around a major pricing issue by recognizing that her company’s customers were more interested in bundled pricing than they were about component prices. She led the sales team to create new conversations to customize product bundles, which deepened the relationships with customers. The results include increased revenue, market share and profit.

4. Turn challenges into games. Be a leader with a spirit of sportsmanship. Your contagious optimistic attitude will inspire energy, innovation and teamwork. And have faith in the possibility of winning. You and your team are infinitely creative and resourceful. Empower yourself and your team in that confidence and you’ll see fabulous performance.

5. Be crystal clear about who will be responsible for what tasks in solving the problem. As you take the time to solve the problem thoroughly, don’t’ go it alone. Also, have an eye for, and conversations about, putting systems and structures in place to prevent the same issue from happening again.

There are additional emotional elements to being resilient, but it ultimately comes down to remembering that although you’ve had challenges in the past, you must be doing something right. Believing that you and your team will prevail goes a long way in good times and in tough times.

So what about you? What are you struggling with that you can handle better with a powerful attitude. How can you to overcome your next challenge in a way that is sustainable. What’s an issue you can convert into a winnable game?

If you’d like to discuss anything along these lines, give me a call – I’d love to explore any matter with you.

Gratitude is the key to happiness. Happy workers are more productive workers. Together, happiness and gratitude create highly enjoyable relationships, and relationships are everything in our careers.

Whether you are a transformed motivational leader working to build a dynamic culture, or you are in business development looking to bring in more clients while taking care of existing clients, or if you are looking to make a career change or advance in your career, the more you practice showing and acknowledging your gratitude, the more you feed and grow relationships with a really good vibe.

It is also important to acknowledge people’s good work because it contributes to a company’s growth and success. When people are acknowledged, they feel truly a part of the company and this encourages them to want to continue to give to and grow with the company. So give credit where credit is due.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Have your acknowledgements be sincere.

Let the people know specifically what they did and what it meant to you. Don’t assume they know or they won’t get to hear it. Importantly, acknowledge who they were being – let them know you recognize who they are and what they stand for in a way that demonstrates that you know what they care about. For example, I would say this to my blog team: “Thank you for helping me come up with and publish these blog topics every week. You make sure we come up with excellent points and you help me think them through, which I couldn’t do the same without you. I appreciate how thoughtful, insightful and committed you are in having us deliver useful, simple and powerful ideas with the people who read our blog.”

2. Keep track of your acknowledgements.

If you want to carry an attitude of gratitude every day, each night make a list of the people whose contributions you are grateful for and what they did. Express your complete gratitude the next day.

3. Surprise people.

Acknowledge people when they least expect it. That shows an extra generosity of spirit and is a lot of fun.

4. Show gratitude for bad news.

Be grateful for set-backs and problems. That sounds counterintuitive, but if you show an appreciation for people telling you things that might be difficult for them to communicate, you open the door to more open and honest communication. This leads to an awareness of what’s going on and that could make the difference between success and failure. I will enlighten you more on this next week when we talk about handling problems powerfully.

So what about you? How will you practice showing gratitude? Who in your world deserves a thorough and sincere acknowledgement from you today?

From little league to the Olympics, athlete get in a winning game with rigorous training, including scrimmage practice. Practice that simulates real competition is critical to success.

Similarly, role playing is practice that takes concepts and ideas and turn them into skills. This is particularly true if you are in a business development role or in sales management. Role playing also helps if you’re a transformational leader building high performance teamwork or are networking and interviewing for a career transition.

Role playing, which for some is awkward at first, builds confidence and develops competence. My colleague, Mitch Weisburgh, and I have been coaching and training sales people to succeed for many years. We think that you’ll benefit from learning our role-play strategy. While we focus here on our approach to sales and business development coaching, the strategy is easily applied to any situation.

Define the situation

It’s always wise to begin with the end in mind and to clarify the answers to these key questions:

· What is the desired outcome?

· What are the likely problems that the desired outcome helps solve?

· What are the likely objections and obstacles?

· What are the selling or communication skills we want to improve?

The goal of the role-play might be around any step in the sales process, for example to arrange for a demonstration, to set to a meeting, or to close the sale.

Establish the three roles

Prepare the players for their roles.

1. Seller: He is the hero who is being trained and developed. He is baring his soul to a process that will come with some criticism along with constructive feedback. The person playing this role has a say in the questions outlined above. What challenges does the Seller typically have and in what stage of the process? What techniques are we practicing? Get this clear before proceeding.

2. Buyer: The antagonist of our role play is someone else from the sales team - a manager, a coach or trainer, or anyone who can portray the role of a decision maker. The sales trainee who plays the Buyer gets to vicariously experience being in the shoes of the person making the decision, which can be highly valuable for developing a thoughtful approach to selling

3. Observer: The observer listens very carefully to both sides of the role play. The Observer answers these questions:

Where did the Seller best use the desired techniques?

Are there one or two areas where the sales person could be coached to perform better?

Are there ideas for how to use language or pace differently or where to ask a question and listen longer?

What other questions, selling points or techniques might be worthwhile to bring into the equation?

Perform the role-play

This takes between two and five minutes. Please recognize before starting that role-playing can be uncomfortable and awkward at first. Moving outside of our comfort zones is really the only way we all become more competent, and the practice will soon get easier. Early in the process and certainly in the first try, the observer should call a few “out-of-role” time-outs to make learning suggestions, offer encouragement and positive feedback. Have a few laughs along the way.

It’s important to repeat the role play two or three times after feedback, so that the Seller is able to build confidence, grasp the new skills and use them effortlessly. After a few repetitions, most people find they get comfortable, and the session becomes an exciting, enjoyable game that has the added benefit of building competence.

Review

The Observer provides notes and feedback to both parties. Additionally, the Seller may ask for feedback from the person who was playing the buyer or from other listeners.

Role-playing is central to developing effective sales and relationship building techniques. We hope this guide helps you develop effective role-playing practices to help you reach your goals.

Call us or coaching and training if you want to reach the hig

Companies don't get to be 100 years old without constant periods of transformation and reinvention.

UPS began in 1907 with a teenager who, with a $100 loan, bought a few bicycles and delivered messages. The telephone made this service unnecessary. It then evolved to delivering packages between department stores. It has grown from a US-focused small package delivery company to one of the world’s largest logistics companies with nearly 400,000 employees.

Its Chief Financial Officer Kurt Kuehn, says, “In this environment there was risk and there was opportunity. We had just not looked broad enough to see what happened before and after the package came to us. The opportunity was there. We had to stretch our boundaries and invent the future. So we changed our UPS mission. This was as big an internal message as an external one. We told our employees our charter was to enable global commerce.”

While physical book stores are going out of business, Amazon, that started off as a book seller is now a virtual store of everything from Botox, to massages to auto-detailing services at a discount.

Business leaders must broadly interpret what they do and what their company does to serve the marketplace, whether you are a transformational leader, business development professional or even in your own career or career transition.

Steve Jobs reinvented Apple. He did not see it as purely a computer company. He included the delivery of music, and then all types of content, across mobile devices and completely changed the landscape, creating whole new industries.

Netflix kept relevant by reinventing itself as a producer of shows while Blockbuster and Eastman Kodak are all victims of not being able to see beyond where they started and did not morph with the times.

Netflix nudged Blockbuster off the stage first by challenging the DVD and VCR retail renter with its cheaper DVD-by-mail. Then it made its own original television series using top talent. Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacy and Oscar winning director David Fincher teamed up for House of Cards series, now in its second season. The American political drama won a Golden Globe award this year.

Companies need to be in the stage of constant innovation and reinvention. Those that snooze, lose. For example, BlackBerry was the standard across corporate America. But it did not see, nor react to, the speed of change around them.

By the end of last year, BlackBerry laid off 4,500 employees, reported a $1 billion quarterly loss and its shares traded at a 52-week low of $5.80. All signs are that the company will go bust this year.

So what about you? In what way can you look at your business more broadly to reinvent a way to expand how to make a difference in your market?

“If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” Infinite Jest by bestselling author David Foster Wallace.

For a business to be most successful and growth oriented, there are times when the most productive thing for a business or a person to do is steadily and consistently repeat a working method and ride its success up the S curve. As the old saying goes, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.” For example, when a sales script is working for a particular target market, or when a production method is producing results in a predictable way. For some people, that kind of consistency is more calming and satisfying than the disruptive need for newness. For others, the repetition can get boring.

ON the other hand, when businesses are innovating, which we’ll talk about next week, there is a lot of excitement and energy as ideas are bounced around and new possibilities are explored.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, author and founder of the Cambridge Zen Center and Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, advises; “When you pay attention to boredom, it gets incredibly interesting.”

Here’s how to deal with boredom:

1. Recognition – you can’t combat boredom unless you recognize how it shows up in your career. What is your boredom cycle? When do you get anxious if there’s nothing new and different going on? Look at your resume. Were there times when you jumped ship? And have you done this frequently? Was it necessary or were you bored? Perhaps what you needed to do was to energize your current career instead of looking for a new career.

2. Acceptance – boredom is only a problem if you declare it as so. Thomas Szasz, award winning author of “The Myth of Mental Illness” says, “Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” The steady state of boredom can also be called the serenity - a space many of us seek- the feeling we have when we go hiking, or to the beach. Life’s a beach. Relax and enjoy exploring the next point.

3. Faith and Patience – sometimes boredom is accompanied by a sense of anxiety. We all like to feel needed. When business activity gets repetitious, do you worry about not providing enough newness to add value? Check in before you jump to conclusions. The best way to ride a business growth wave may be having faith in patiently staying the course.

4. Wonderment and Curiosity – The best boredom buster of all is to “be unborable,” as Wallace continues in “Infinite Jest.” Take some time to look deeper at what you’re doing, who you’re being, what relationships you can strengthen by wondering what’s possible.

5. Preparing for Improvement– if you are in a business development role, leadership role or considering a career change, use some of your time to prepare for future changes and refinements. Can you organize a list of things to upgrade your business model or your performance for when the time is ripe? Can you try one tweak at a time to make things better? If you’re a transformational leader, explore how you can motivate your team to discover possible breakthroughs for the future.

Choose to be fully engaged in whatever you do at whatever stage it’s in, and you will get great joy from your business and life. You’ll bring your passion to it.

So, what about you? What are you getting bored of that you could experience differently if you bring a sense of wonder to it?

Next week we’ll talk about innovation and reinvention.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” ― Confucius

Passion in your career is a driving force. Prior to this career as a coach that I’ve had for 16 years, I had eleven jobs in 10 years! I didn’t have any clarity of purpose. I didn’t have any sense of passion. I had no commitment. I was just blowing with the wind.

I don’t have regrets as the journey provided some worthwhile experience. I worked in corporate brand licensing for a year-and-a-half. I did some work helping inventors get out their ideas. I did a whole bunch of things. But every two years, I either quit or was fired because there was no real sense of commitment to being successful and no passion about my work. When I thought I was at the end of my rope, I took a job with my uncle in a very small investor relations agency. I was often grumpy and obnoxious. People didn’t want to be around me and my relationships soured.

Without clarity of purpose, your career is left to chance. And your attitude of dissatisfaction tends to spill out to other areas of your life as well.

When you have clarity and passion, you sustain a meaningful career and are excited about work every day, as I am now.

Whether you are in a position of transformational leadership and working to build a successful company; or you are in a business development role searching everyday for clients; or you are looking to make a career transition or a career change, it helps to have a career you love.

Here’s how I did it. Based on a personal development program called the Landmark Forum which I completed in 1995, I made a commitment. I spoke these words to myself out loud and to everyone I knew - I am committed to being successful in a fulfilling career that I love.

This is how you get from a mediocre career to a lucrative and meaningful career:

• Start with commitment - with clarity, declare to yourself, “I am committed to a successful, lucrative career that I love.”

• Explore and clarify your unique career direction, which you can learn more about in this blog post (http://jfcoach.com/blog/work-playground).

• Put your unique value proposition in your objective statement, in your resume and in your conversations around your network. Post it on a wall or mirror so you see it every day. Surround yourself with it and the programming will be imprinted into your brain and spur you to action.

• Tell people - talk to everyone in your network, talk to your friends, and reach out to your contacts.

• Keep declaring the commitment – out loud, and stay in that process. If you don’t quit, you won’t fail.

So, how about you? Are you ready to make a new level of commitment to a career you love?

“The world, including my office, is my playground. The world, including my playground, is my office.” Jonathan Flaks.

Making your work place fun has significant, exciting benefits. Getting people engaged in work is one of them. In 2012, talent recruiter Towers Watson did a Global Workforce Study of 32,000 professionals at large and midsize organizations across a range of industries in 50 companies. Those with what they call a "high sustainable engagement" achieved an average operating margin of 27.4% which is almost three times higher than the average operating margin of other companies.

Whether you are in a position of transformational leadership, or if you are in a business development role and you are looking to get clients, or if you are looking to make a change in your career or get a new job, going about any of these serious matters with an attitude of fun just works.

It also lowers stress. Virtually all studies on the subject show that stress is a major factor in health, healing and wellness. Fun at work lowers stress and that reduces absenteeism. According to a 2001 Bureau of Labor Statistics study, “The median number of days away from work as a result of anxiety, stress, and related disorders was 25 days per year – substantially greater than the median of 6 days per year for all nonfatal injury and illness cases.”

Research by author Dan Clemens, founder of Quiet Path Communications and former Employee Communications Manager during the US West/ Qwest Merger impacting 52,000 employees, found that:

• Making work fun leads directly to better performance on the job. Having fun drives people to do their best work.

• To have a positive impact on productivity, quality, engagement and retention, fun must be ingrained in the work, rather that be special events separate from the work.

If fun reduces stress, and energizes people to produce greater output and profit, how do we bring this into the work place?

G. Guidelines – a well-conceived game is exciting. If you let people know that a game is being created, and take time to specify goals, explain expectations and expand the availability of resources, people with be crystal clear about how to play. When we all know what results we’re aiming for, we get to play with all we have.

A. Actions – as the game gets started, you’ll have better results if clear communication is provided as to who is responsible for which actions in order for the team to win.

M. Measure results - keep a scorecard and make sure actions and results are both held as valuable. Let people check in to see how they are doing and coach them to improve their performance.

E. End with excitement – morale is boosted if there is a celebration after every game, win or lose, You’ll get more out of every game if you celebrate victories and also celebrate efforts and learning from mistakes or setbacks.

S. Start over – don’t wait too long to get complacent after a win or dejected after a loss. Get back into planning the game as soon as the last celebration is completed and you’ve all had a little rest. Soon, you’ll have a sustainable spirit of fun at work.

This kind of good sportsmanship creates a lively culture in your workplace, and brings a competitive advantage in marketing, recruitment and retention and just feels great. You may never feel like you’ve really worked another day in your life. Fun at work works.

What about you? What’s an aspect of your work you can energize with a spirit of fun and sportsmanship?

Next week we will talk about finding your passion and purpose that will bring you joy in your career.

“Fear can be good when you're walking past an alley at night or when you need to check the locks on your doors before you go to bed, but it's not good when you have a goal and you're fearful of obstacles. We often get trapped by our fears, but anyone who has had success has failed before.” Queen Latifah.

What she’s talking about is the fear of failure - the fear that stops you from pursuing your goals. It is the concern that if you attempt something and fail, it would be devastating.

It is important to get in touch with your fears so that you can overcome your fears. Or you may find that when you move towards something you want, you get a physiological experience and you talk yourself out of it. You remain stuck in the same old cycle.

With courage, you can look at and overcome your fears, and thereby be empowered to achieve anything you want in your life - whether you want to grow your business or bring in more clients as a business development professional; or to provide a fully engaged culture in a transformational leadership role or simply to get a new job on a new career path.

Here’s how to access courage.

• Identify what failures you are afraid of and jot them down on the left side of a page. What are some of the top things that you think might happen if you were to fail. What is the worst that could happen if you were to fail?

• On the right hand side of the page, for each fear you have listed, write down something you can do, someone you can count on for support or a different way of looking at it.

o For example – you might have a fear that if you try to engage in a conversation with a person who has authority over your position, you could put your job at risk – on the other hand, if you speak up, you might be able to generate an appropriate conversation that makes a difference. You could also recognize that your job is always at risk and you should have a resume and a strong network ready to connect with at all times.

• As you break down your fears, you will be able to see how you can step up and focus on your goals with a new sense of courage and a renewed confidence.

I am going to borrow from T. Har Eker’s “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”. He said that poor people think that their problems are bigger than they are, while rich people consider themselves bigger than their problems. I include challenges when I use the word problems.

I invite you to consider yourself bigger, more capable, more resourceful, and more creative than you previously thought of yourself. I think of you as infinitely creative and resourceful. You are someone who comes up with new ideas all the time, and you have people to reach out for their support, and they know people, too. When you consider yourself to be bigger than your biggest challenge, you overcome any fear and achieve anything you want.

Yes, sometimes you will still have to muster up the emotional state called courage to deal with that feeling in your chest. However, every time you do spomethig bold, whether you accomplish a desired outcome successfully or if you fall short of your target, you will have a new experience from which you have learned and that builds confidence and experience. That confidence and experience will thereby require less effort to must up courage on your next try. And if you keep trying, you can’t fail.

How about you? What’s a big juicy goal you have and the challenge that you are facing that if you face it with courage you’ll gain experience and/or create victories worth celebrating?

Today we are talking about Balanced Networking. These are important concepts and practices regardless of your role in business. If you are a CEO or in an executive leadership role in a company, you will always want to expand your network. There are two sides to the coin of making new relationships to keep in balance.

The first one is having the “You NEVER KNOW” attitude – believing that anything is possible. Dr. Ivan Misner, founder of BNI, made a similar suggestion in an Entrepreneur magazine article "Networking Fundamentals to Boost Your Bottom Line. One of his points is to “Continuously add people to your network - think variety, not quantity.”

When you are out and about meeting people, be open to talking to anyone. You never know! Do you remember when you first met your best client? Did you know that the person was going to be your best client? You never know who is going to be the next superstar person in your business or your life.

Dr. Misner also advises us to “Be selective.” This is particularly relevant when you are organizing your follow up.

In other words, when figuring out how stay in touch with the people you meet, trust your instincts to schedule more quality time with people most likely to become dream clients, dream contacts, centers of influence, a dream employee, ideal referral partner, etc. and who would value what you do and who you are. That way, if you do run out of time, you will end the day saying, "Wow, what a productive day I had!"

So how about you? How might you balance your networking? More open-ness? More activity? More fine-tuned prioritization?

Can you really stretch so that you can achieve more in business and life? Yes!

Stretching is important in your development. Stretching is the process in which you go for what you really want - looking beyond what you think you are limited by and getting around obstacles that are in your way. Stretching changes the way your brain works, so you have greater capacity for producing the results you want. Then from there you can stretch more.