The Yes Paradox

The Yes Paradox

by | 03,18 | Leadership, Stories, inspirations & thoughts for the day

The Yes Paradox

Let’s talk about the words YES and NO. Does saying YES really lead you to the right opportunities?

Or does it lead you to the world of insanity?

YES and NO. Such definite answers. Great words for making decisions. And yet say YES more often than you’ve got time for, and this can break your entrepreneurial success.

The Yes Paradox. Does saying YES really lead you to the right opportunities? Or does it lead to the world of insanity? Yes and No. Such definite answers. Great words for making decisions. And yet saying one of the words more than the other, can make or break your long term entrepreneurial success. Let me know what you think about saying YES in the comments below. Are you a YES or a NO person? And why?

Posted by Karen Skidmore – True Profit Business on Wednesday, March 7, 2018

 

When you first start out, your world is your oyster. The adventure is exciting and terrifying all at the same time. You may or not have a clear vision at the beginning but one thing you have for sure is time.

With no clients or customers, you have plenty of time to work ON your business. And this is where saying YES can be incredibly powerful.

Saying YES opens up yourself to opportunities. Allows you to explore new avenues of potential. Gives you the chance to try out different things which can feed your creativity and clarity.

But there comes a certain point that the YES get too much.

As you say YES to another thing. And then another thing, your time gets eaten up.

Until your time is at rock bottom and you’ve reached the place of INSANITY.

1) You’re stressed because you’ve taken on too much. And I don’t care what you read about multi-tasking, it simply doesn’t work. Modern society has tricked us into thinking that we can do lots of things at the same time; particularly women.

But the truth is PRIORITIES was never meant to be a plural. It’s an oxymoron that we have PRIORITIES. Only one thing can have our conscious attention at the time.

2) This leads to resentment. As you stretch yourself further and further, it’s easier to blame other people and other projects who suck up your time. All it takes is one thing not to go right and it puts your schedule out on everything else for days or weeks.

3) You then proudly wear The Busy Badge of Honour. If someone asks us how we are, how often do we proudly answer, “Oh, I’m busy. So busy.” And the other person answers, “That’s great. So am I.” which simply confirms to us that being busy is the right thing to be.

But it’s simply not.

This place of insanity keeps you sucked in under to-do lists and deadlines created by other people. You react. You juggle. You try to work harder. But you just never get where you want to go.

Knowing when to start saying NO is critical to your long-term success. If you have a vision and a plan to play a bigger game, NO has to be the answer to the majority of questions asked of you.

Because by saying NO, it allows the right YES to be said at the right time.

So I hope this helps you reflect on what you’re saying YES to right now and what you’re saying NO to right now.

Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.

 

 

 

 

The space between your pendulum swings

The space between your pendulum swings

by | 02,18 | Stories, inspirations & thoughts for the day

The space between your pendulum swings

How to create the space that allows you to reflect, review and connect with your bigger vision and be able to grow your business.

Today I want to draw your attention to the spaces between your pendulum swings. The space between where you push forward and you pull back.

I’m now in my 14th year of business so I know what it takes to make a business success out of selling expertise and talent and working from an office at home.

I learnt very early on that the practical side of marketing and selling oneself was only one half of the equation. There’s often a huge inner battle going on whenever any decisions are being made on pricing, positioning, making yourself visible – generally putting yourself “out there”.

So no matter how amazing your product or programme is – how beautiful your website is – some days you simply don’t feel good about your marketing because you’ve created all sorts of stories about whether you are going really up to the job of following through with your business plans. 

How do you create the space between your pendulum swings? Without space, you get stuck in the trenches and that’s no fun you’re hard at but feeling frustrated with your results. If you want to grow and take your business forward, you have to create space. You can’t wait for it to come to you. You have to take responsibility and create it yourself because when you do, that’s when the magic starts to happen. Until next time, do less, be more and play that bigger game x

Posted by Karen Skidmore on Thursday, 1 February 2018

 

One day I’d wake up and give myself a good talking to and realise I just need to dig deep and get on stuff. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you don’t do it. And a lot of stuff you do in your business feels hard the first time you do it because you’re new at it.

Whether that’s writing email copy. Or planning out a blog series that you want to position your latest thinking about an important topic within your industry. Or getting yourself up on a stage at a large conference. I get that a lot of this stuff is scary.

There’s a tonne of stuff I’ve pushed myself through on and got done. I’m sure you’ve done the same.

But sometimes all it takes is one crappy email. Or read a comment on someone else’s Facebook post. Or you overhear a friend or relative say something negative about you.

And if you’re tired. Or pissed off with something that may not even be work related … it’s easy to shut yourself down and you pendulum back again as you let doubt creep in and fear strangle your boldness.

These swings can happen daily. Sometimes the swings are weeks apart. You feel in flow and everything goes great for a while. And then you get tired of pushing through and you get in a funk and you pendulum swing back for a few weeks.

It varies from person to person. From season to season.

But how often do you feel the space? That space right in the middle when you’re not pushing forward and you’re not pulling yourself back.

A pendulum has momentum. If you swing yourself forward hard into pushing and it’s easy for that pendulum to swing back in the same force and wipe you off your feet. You push forward and it swings back again. It’s exhausting – particularly if this is happening every day!

So space. Time to reflect. Time to breathe.

I find it incredible that in my first 6 or 7 years in business I don’t think I breathed much at all. It was go go go and then retreat. I don’t remember breathing into anything. Feeling space and energy to be more strategic about what I was doing.

I was just doing.

So space.

The point in the day where you kick off your shoes and shake out all that sitting.

The point in the day where you breathe – big belly breathes – to fill your brain with oxyen.

Perhaps even a whole day where you take off and work in a local coffee shop or hotel reception area.

It’s the proverbial helicopter – seeing the woods for the trees. This space between the swings that allows us to reflect, review and connect with our bigger vision – our mission – our desire to grow and play bigger.

So what can you do this week to create this important space?

5 minutes is sometimes all you need. Perhaps you in serious need of a whole day.

But without space, you’re stuck in the trenches. And that’s no fun when you’re working hard and not seeing the results you really want.

If you want to grow and take your business forward, you have to create the space to do this. You can’t wait for that space to be created for you … it starts with you

Until next time.

Do Less. Be More. Play Bigger.

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What do you do when you’ve had a crap day?

What do you do when you’ve had a crap day?

by | 05,17 | Stories, inspirations & thoughts for the day

What do you do when you’ve had a crap day?

If you work from home, it’s easy not see any one for several days. Especially if you work with clients by email or phone.

There is no coffee room talk or quick catch-ups by the photocopying machine that you used to have in PAYE world.  And sometimes it can feel just darn lonely being your own boss.

So what happens to your motivation when you have a bad day?

We all get them, don’t we?  A client who cancels a meeting at the last minute.  5 rejections on your follow up phone calls, one after another.  A laptop that decides to stop working when you have a proposal that needs doing.

If you are lucky enough to have a supportive partner or a good friend who understands what it is you are trying to achieve, then it makes it easier.  But many of you don’t.  There may even be people around you who don’t really believe that you will succeed in your plans and possibly don’t even want you to, for what ever reason.

This is why it is good to have a couple of simple strategies up your sleeve that will allow you to pick yourself after a bad day and get back on the straight and narrow.  Here are some of my favourites:

Know when to stop. One bad thing seems to attract another and when you are feeling this way, it is far better to move away from what you are doing.  Stop forcing yourself to follow up those phone calls, for example, when you are beginning to believe that you are only going to get “no’s”.  Because that is exactly what you will get at that time.

Take a break. Go out for a walk, tweet away on Twitter, do some household chores, go out and buy a newspaper – it doesn’t really matter what it is a long as you are able to distance yourself from the stuff that doesn’t seem to be going your way.

Have a business buddy. A friend may not understand what you are going through if you phone up for a moan (and can quite often encourage you to moan even more if they are being sympathetic to your needs!)  Having one or two business buddies – people you feel you can be honest with and yet can encourage each other to move forward with projects and ideas – can be a lifesaver on a bad day.  Having someone who understands but keeps you on track with a little kick on your behind!

Play your favourite tune. Cheesey I know, but playing your favourite upbeat music and having a little dance around the office can do wonders for a mind shift. No one is watching after all!

Make a daily list of achievements.  A great habit to get in to is to write down the 3 things you have been most proud of each day in a journal, diary or on your PC.  It could be as amazing as winning a huge contract or as small as making a call to someone you have been putting off for weeks.  Whenever you feel like the business is against you, read through your lists and realise how much you have achieved already.

Remember not every day is going to be a great day.  There will be days that clients cancel, work goes wrong.  You can’t control other people’s (and technology!) actions.  But the one thing you can control is the way you deal with those actions when they happen.

What do you do to get over your crap days?

How to stop faffing and turn your BIG plans in to results

How to stop faffing and turn your BIG plans in to results

by | 05,17 | Stories, inspirations & thoughts for the day

How to stop faffing and turn your BIG plans in to results

It’s the little daily stuff that makes it all happen!

Thinking big is good! You’ve got to have a plan. But starting the week paper shuffling, email faffing and hiding in Twitter is not going to crack it.

And a big problem many of you seem to have (me too!) is being able to break down the BIG plan in to little daily stuff.

Let me give you some examples:

“ Get blogging” becomes “Write and publish a blog article every Wednesday” (yes, I am sure you know that the more you blog, the more effective your blogging will be, but if you don’t commit to one every week, then it ain’t going happen!)

“Do more in LinkedIn” becomes “Invite 5 new connections on LinkedIn every Monday morning” (yup, you could be doing more, but hey – let’s start with something do-able!)

“Do newsletter” becomes “Write and send out your email newsletter every third Thursday” (OK, so once a week or fortnight is more effective, but if it is all too much you will only end up in overwhelm and that won’t do any good, will it?)

“Follow up on new networking contacts” becomes “Phone 3 people up on a Tuesday morning” (what phone?? Is that allowed in this new world of social networking?! – Duh! Yes!)

“Fill pipeline” becomes “Make a plan to meet one new person for coffee every fortnight” (Surely you could more, but hey one a fortnight is better because you are DOING it!)

Need me to go on?

It’s too easy to think BIG and then give yourselves HUGE plans … that never seem to happen.

It’s the little daily stuff that makes it all happen.

Completion not perfection

Completion not perfection

by | 04,17 | Stories, inspirations & thoughts for the day

Completion not perfection

It can be expected that everything you do in your business, you want done right.  To have the correct grammar and spelling.  To have the right message and images in your marketing material.  To hav your logo in the right corner of your invoice.

After all, you have standards and the right business image to create.

But to strive for perfection is business suicide.

Perfection means that everything has to be just right.

And to be just right it can take weeks, if not months, of checking and checking again.

Running your own business means that you can’t afford weeks of indecision and making the smallest of corrections before launching a new product or service.

Actions need to be taken for you to move forward.  Projects need completing for results to be seen.  And you can’t find out what is and what isn’t going to work until the results come in.

So if you are a perfectionist and are waiting for a final check before you launch that website, send out that email, speak to that client – just remember the completion, not perfection rule.

Take action and do!

Where do we go from here?

Where do we go from here?

by | 03,17 | Stories, inspirations & thoughts for the day

Where do we go from here?

Here comes Monday. The start of a new week. The door to another 7 days of opportunity.

Sometimes Monday follows on from a previously fabulous week; a week that flowed and gave you results and seeds of success that you may not have even realised were going to come your way. Sometimes Monday gives you the chance to shake off and begin again after a series of disasters or disappointments. But either way, Monday always comes, marking the start of a new week.

As sure as the sun rises every morning and sets at the end of the day, Monday arrives to give you the opportunity to carry on as you were or do something different.

For me, Monday is now a morning of reflection, reviewing and planning. My team meetings happen on a Monday and I feel my energy needing to go down to my roots to check that my foundations are still solid and we’re not just bouncing from one project to the next.

In previous years, Monday has been a day for roaring. A day for charging on full throttle and getting stuff done. But when I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath from the week before – and sometimes from several weeks before – it’s been easy to charge into action plans and ticking things off a to do list that may not now need doing. That’s where my energy gets depleted. And my focus goes on stuff that keeps me busy for the sake of being busy.

And I know from 13 years of being in business for myself, that it’s darn easy to be busy for the sake of being busy. So much one could be doing and reacting to stuff that doesn’t actually need to be done by you (or sometimes by anyone!).

I still do way too much in my business and this is why Monday’s reflection, review and planning is critical for me to ensure I not just asking what needs to be done this week, but to ensure I ask “Who can do that for me?”

So as you think about your week ahead, come up with answers to WHO rather than just WHAT … if you’re not much of a delegator yet, don’t worry … it takes practice. I’m doing my best to practice every week and, although it does throw up all sorts of challenges, I look back to where I was a year ago and I’m definitely improving.

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