Posted 4/24/2007 by Josh Hinds

You Will Attract What You Are!
by Lisa Jimenez

If you want to build a business with leaders, be a great leader. If you want to experience a loving relationship, be a loving person. If you want to have joy in your life, be a joyful person.

The reverse is also true. If you are complaining that you have negative friends, an unsupportive spouse, and bad luck. You need to take a good look at you.

You really will attract what you already are. Begin working on your best self, today! And if you've been working on your personal development, continue! Every business success is preceded by a personal success - a personal growth.

Are you proud of the leader you are? Are you impressed by your bravery, loyalty, and love? If you aren't, then how can others be? And how can you attract what you have not identified within yourself? Think of the saying we used to say when we were kids, "It takes one to know one!" We didn't realize then how profound that statement was. Yes, it does take a leader to recognize a leader. It does take a loyal lover to recognize another. Instead of working on them, begin working on you! Become what you want to attract.

You Will Attract What You Are!

Have a great day!
Lisa Jimenez M.Ed.
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Lisa Jimenez, M.Ed., has helped thousands of top salespeople shatter their self-limiting beliefs and finally get the breakthrough success they want. When it comes to personal productivity and creating unstoppable momentum - there is no one better for your salespeople than Lisa. Visit Rx-Success.com for business building success resources by Lisa Jimenez.

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Posted 4/19/2007 by Josh Hinds

3 Secrets of Turning Failure Into Success Immediately!
By Richard Fenton

1) Change your mental model of "success" and "failure"

Most people operate with the following mental model: they see themselves in the middle, with success on one end and failure on the other. They do everything they can to move toward success and away from failure.

What if, rather than seeing failure as something to be avoided it became a "stepping-stone" on the path to success? In other words: Success is the destination. Failure is how you get there. To achieve significant success in today's world, failure is not just a possibility... it is a requirement.

2) Intentionally increase your failure rate

If it's true that the more we fail, the more we succeed (and it is), then the immediate goal should be to intentionally increase your failure rate! Yes, this is a counter-intuitive, reverse thinking philosophy... but it works!

Intentionally increasing failure is the basis for the "Go for No" concept. "Go for No" means the more people that tell you "no" the closer you will get to ultimate success - or in other words, "yes." Most people, if they actually counted the number of times they hear "no" during a typical day or week (which we recommend they do) would be shocked to see how low the number actually is.

3) Set "No" goals

Everyone sets success goals; few people set "no" goals. And that is what we suggest. But how about setting goals for the number of times we fail? For example, rather than a salesperson setting the goal of having 2 prospects say "yes" to them, they set the goal of being turned down (hearing "no") 10 times. Imagine the first two prospects they called on said, "Yes!" Rather than being done (having hit their "yes" goal) they'd actually be behind because they still have 10 noes to go!
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Richard Fenton is the co-author of "Go for No!" a short, powerful story written specifically for organizations and professionals just like you who must learn how to face failure and rejection to be successful. For more free cutting edge ideas and strategies to help you achieve courageous breakthrough performance, accelerate your success and double, triple or even quadruple your sales go to: www.GoForNo.com and sign up for the Free Ezine, ROAR!

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Posted 4/17/2007 by Josh Hinds

Simple actions reap Big Rewards!
By John Di Lemme

Today I am writing about one of the most powerful yet simple 'pebbles of action' towards building your mountain of success. This one action step will separate you from the crowd and empower you to develop a network of people, who have a high regard of respect for you.

The action is simply using a *Few words of Appreciation*.

The words....

'Thank You' are simple but at the same time extremely powerful!

I've often said that the difference between ordinary and EXTRAordinary is just a little bit of EXTRA. Well, as I meet people and do business, I always make an extra-effort to say 'Thank You' by way of e-mail, voicemail or send a card in the mail.

People always comment on how much they appreciated the 'Thank You'. In these days of such hectic schedules and people running all over the place and trying to get ahead, sometimes we forget the simplest things in life are the most powerful and rewarding. You need to think to yourself about a time someone sent you a thank you and how much it meant to you.

Always remember to...

'Do unto others as you would have done unto you!'

After you finish an event make a note to yourself to send a timely thank-you. Simple actions reap big rewards! I personally like to leave a voicemail message or send an e-mail message with the subject line 'Thank You'.

Life is a journey and as you progress, the key is to establish a reputation as one who appreciates others. People will always feel comfortable introducing you to one of their contacts knowing your past pattern has been one of professionalism and respect.

You need to realize that your most notable achievements in life will usually be the result of someone introducing you to one of his or her contacts.

From this day forward, always take a little pebble of action in order to build your mountain of success!

'Thank you' is a fantastic place to start!

I will start the ball rolling by thanking YOU! I truly appreciate your time and testimonials about how we have been able to empower you to achieve your WHY in Life!

I Thank You for Being a *True Champion*!

-- John Di Lemme

P.S. Learn more about John Di Lemme's powerful book, Find Your Why and Fly.

Posted 4/14/2007 by Josh Hinds

The Problem with Time Management
By Vince Thompson

If you've been living in the corporate world for some time, you've probably attended a training session where one of the exercises was to conduct a "time spent" analysis in order to increase your efficiency.

You cracked open your calendar, reviewed how you spent your time for the past week, and identified black holes that were wasting your energy. Maybe you even went so far as to break your activities into categories, separating the "urgent" things from the "important" things and both of these from the "insignificant" things.

Time management studies like these can be interesting, but the findings are almost always the same. Virtually every manager who works through the exercises discovers that he or she is spending too much time on "putting out fires" -- dealing with the daily dramas and emergencies around the office -- and not enough time thinking and planning for long-term projects that really matter.

E-mails, instant messages, phone calls, and that guy from Purchasing who drops in "just for a second" and chews the fat for 45 minutes undo our best-laid plans -- not to mention the endless, interminable, usually pointless meetings.

We know all this. Why doesn't it ever change?

The problem lies in our approach. Time management programs usually focus on your personal productivity, analyzing how you choose to spend your time. This is all fine and dandy, but it misses one essential truth: In an organization that's devoted to banging pots, you better bang pots or have a damn good reason for not banging them.

That's why, after the PowerPoint presentation had ended and the trainer went home, you fell back into your old, unproductive rhythms -- not because you didn't agree with the time management expert's analysis, but because you returned to normal life in the world of The Middle . . . which means doing what you think your boss wants you to do. Bang! Bang! Bang!

Managing Your Managers...

In order to take back your time, your life, and your career, you need to make a new kind of change in your approach to self-management. You must step into the realm of managing your managers and thereby altering their expectations related to your time. The goal is to achieve complete alignment between what your bosses want (and perhaps need) you to do and what you believe you really should do.

In the same way that you coordinate the schedule in your PDA and your laptop with the one in your desktop computer, you need to continually coordinate with your bosses to ensure that you are clear, on track, and working from the same plan.

All of this starts with having a happy and supportive boss. And that means a successful boss. Your boss has to be successful. For if he is not, his failure may cast a negative light on everyone on his team. Many potentially great careers have been stalled, not because of the effort of the individual, but because of a boss who failed to make an impact, who failed to demonstrate his own value and the value of those on his team.

The first step in managing your manager is to move beyond your own needs to examine your bosses' needs. Sounds reasonable -- but understanding those needs and figuring out what to do to meet them isn't usually straightforward. In fact, it's a challenge in itself, requiring a whole new set of skills most people have never thought about.

Needs Explicit and Needs Implicit...

Let's start by dispelling a common misunderstanding. Lots of people in business assume that "meeting the boss's needs" means doing exactly what the boss wants them to do -- accepting the boss's vision and direction wholesale. Wrong! This assumption is simple-minded and inaccurate. It leads to managers in The Middle focusing on aligning their lips with their boss's backsides rather than meeting anyone's actual needs.

Real "managing upward" demands a more serious and subtle analysis of human needs, which starts with the realization that needs come in two forms -- explicit needs and implicit needs.

Explicit needs are easier to understand. They may be stated in the strategic plan promulgated by the company or the division, or they may be announced by your boss whenever the team gets together for the usual pep talk/torture session. They may sound something like this:

* "We need to expand our business internationally!"

* "We need to create a shipping policy that will save us some money and keep the administrative assistants from running around the office like decapitated chickens every afternoon at 4 p.m. when the FedEx guy makes his last pickup."

* "We need to commerce-enable our Web site before Amazon.com decides to start selling the same kinds of widgets we sell and drives us out of business."

* "We need to hire two more designers, fast, so we'll have a prayer of getting the fall product line into the stores sometime this year."

Explicit needs are the kinds of things that make it into the lists of goals you write every year at objective-setting time. They're the things you tell people you're working on when they ask. They tend to be the things you are proud of accomplishing (if and when you happen to accomplish one of them).

Implicit needs are more subtle. People don't talk about them. Sometimes they're not even aware of them. Most of the time they are things that people would deny if confronted with them. They sound like this:

* "Make me look good in front of my boss so that when he gets kicked upstairs he'll recommend me for his job."

* "Help me demonstrate my creativity by coming up with some ideas for next year's marketing campaign that I can tweak a little and show off at the next divisional conference as if they were mine.

* "Help me feel more like a leader and less like the kid who was always picked last in the schoolyard basketball games."

* "Figure out some way to keep the department running when I'm not around so I can go on vacation for ten days in a row without having to call the office every two hours to make sure the damned place isn't on fire."

While explicit needs tend to run a linear path, implicit needs tend to be random, triggered by emotion and circumstance. But don't think of them as flighty and certainly not as insignificant. They are ever-present, tenacious, and can overrule the explicit needs with a swiftness and power that can be awe-inspiring.

It's a fun exercise to sit down with a sheet of paper and try listing your boss's implicit needs. It's also deadly serious. From the first day you meet your new boss through the last day you work together, you need to devote a portion of your time and energy to scoping out his or her implicit needs and defining them with as much precision as possible. Then measure whatever you do against those needs. (Your boss certainly will.)

One implicit need that virtually every boss has (and therefore belongs on the to-do list of every ignited manager) is the need for confidence. Your boss must have confidence that you are working in his best interest and that you are capable of delivering what he needs (both explicitly and implicitly). Fail to maintain this confidence and your boss will most likely drive you crazy -- and will often drive you out.

We've all been there. The boss who last week simply set a goal and gave us the freedom to carry it out suddenly wants to micromanage every phone call we make this week. Sometimes it's because they've lost confidence in us; other times it's because their bosses have lost confidence in them, producing a sort of trickle-down anxiety that may end up with you being hypercritical of the dinosaur diorama your nine-year-old makes for science class. Giving your boss a sense of confidence in you is perhaps the most fundamental of all the implicit needs and the one without which no managerial relationship can succeed.

Understanding the implicit and explicit needs of your boss and his bosses sets a course by which you can align your own efforts. When that alignment is clear and accurate, you're on track to creating an environment in which traction is possible.

Management Value Added...

The concept of Management Value Added (MVA) is based on a simple question that you should ask whenever you're making a decision about how to invest your time and energy: "What value does management add?" And how can your actions "add value" to any situation in business? That's right -- by helping to meet your bosses' needs.

One way to start using the concept of MVA is by sitting down with your boss to discuss his or her explicit needs (the ones written down as part of the company's strategy or the division's official mandate). It shouldn't take long for the two of you to agree on what they are and to prioritize them appropriately. Then ask your boss, "How do you feel I can add the most value?" If your boss responds, "Huh?" you can flesh out the question with additional questions like these:

* "What are the activities I am engaged in when I am contributing the most?"

* "What are the activities that you and the company most need me to do?"

* "What do you consider to be the best and most productive use of my time?"

* "What do you think is the special contribution that I am best positioned to offer to you and the company?"

* "Of all the things that I'm engaged in on behalf of this company, what are the three areas where you believe that I can contribute the most?"

Listen carefully to your boss's answers. Using them as a guide, you can begin to understand exactly how your boss views your contributions. It's quite likely that the way he or she measures your MVA is different from the way you might measure it.

Here's what one of my bosses had to say when I asked him to define my most important areas for MVA:

1. "Hiring, nurturing, and guiding talent; putting the right people in the right jobs with the right goals."

2. "Building capability; teaching my team members and creating an environment conducive to challenging thought and growth:"

3. "Staying close to the customers -- understanding what's important to them, what their challenges are, and how our company can provide them with solutions."

Of course, this exercise will relate only to your boss's explicit needs. (Don't try to engage him in a discussion of his implicit needs. There's a good reason why they're implicit.) Having these priorities clearly defined is an enormous step forward and an advantage that surprisingly few managers enjoy. It provides you with a framework you can share with others on your team and allows you to use the test of MVA in your quest to get past pot banging.

You can use MVA to help you determine how to spend your time, which projects to support, and which meetings to attend. In my case, before committing energy to any new activity, I ask myself: "Will this activity help me achieve my priorities? Will it help me put the right people in the right jobs? Will it help me build capability? Will it help me know and connect with our customers?" If the answer is no, I avoid the activity -- even if it sounds otherwise interesting, appealing, or fun.

MVA helps you maintain a focus on the things that matter while earning the support of those you serve. When your boss or someone else in the organization asks you to commit time or energy to an area that falls outside of the MVA priorities you've established, you can talk about how new commitment may affect your main goals and reach a joint decision as to whether a shift in priorities is warranted.

Copyright (c) 2007 Vince Thompson from the book Ignited
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Vince Thompson, principal at Middleshift Consulting, works with Internet companies to design world-class online marketing solutions and build sales organizations empowering those in the middle. His clients include Napster, StarStyle.com. and Break.com. Thompson holds an undergraduate degree in Communications from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications, and an MBA from Pepperdine University. To learn more about Vince Thompson and the community of Ignited managers, visit www.beignited.com.

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Posted 4/05/2007 by Josh Hinds

Using Visualization with Goal Setting video by Josh Hinds

Here's a quick video I did on the topic of "Using Visualization to Achieve Your Goals". I hope you enjoy it... All the best, Josh Hinds :-)



note: If you're not able to play the video above, or you just want to save it and view it again later you can use the following link.

Posted 4/01/2007 by Josh Hinds

Stop Chasing Success and Let Success Find You
By Robert Moment

One of the major problems that many business entrepreneurs have is that instead of following their own goals, ambitions and interests to gain success, they choose to chase after success by working to establish themselves in a hot business market that may not be of any interest to them.

Although it is possible to achieve success by running a business that holds little interest to you, before long, you will find that this sort of venture will drain your ambition, and ultimately have a negative effect on you both personally and professionally.

Think about it: What would keep you more motivated - Being in a job you enjoy, or in a job that you find boring? Not a difficult question to answer right?

Naturally having a job you enjoy is something that almost everyone strives for; however, the problem that many new business entrepreneurs are faced with is that they have a hard time figuring out what they want out of life. Thus, they proceed to fumble around in different professions, desperately groping around in the dark for their one true calling. This leaves them constantly chasing after a success that is always two steps ahead of them.

To avoid this from happening to you, the following 7 key points will help you stop chasing after success, so you can use your interests to let success find you.

1. Find your life’s purpose and true calling: Remember when you were a child and you had such high hopes for your future, when you used to dream about all of the great things you would do once you were older and able to make your dreams a reality. Well even if this was not one of your childhood fancies, it is time for you to take a serious look at those dreams you lost and hid away in the back of your mind, and find out how you can make them work and grow in your business.

2. Did you choose your work or did your work choose you? Surprisingly, many people fail to take this into consideration, and instead choose to keep their focus on making fast money with the current popular market. By following this type of career, you have given all of your business power and control to a market that can offer you nothing but quick cash until that market dies, or you lose interest and move on to search for hopefully the next big thing.

3. Are you using your natural talents or “gifts” that you enjoy and do so well? Ask yourself if you are using your expertise to benefit your business. Your talents will help make you creative, innovative and keep you challenged. It is your “gifts” that make you an expert of a particular field. Use this to your advantage, and success will find you.

4. Are you ignoring your passions and values? Most people have values, and regardless if these values are religious, personal or so on, the values that you follow say a great deal about your character, and your passions. Therefore, if you are running a business that you don’t believe in, and that is personally unfulfilling, you will never achieve the success you are after, because you don’t have faith in your own business.

5. All of us have gifts but sometimes many of us have a difficult time identifying them: Finding your own talents may take time, but it is time well worth spending. If you have a hard time thinking of things you are good at, make a list of all the times you did really well in school, sports, arts and various life experiences. It may also help to speak with those who you are close to. Often your most trusted friends and family can clue you in on what you excel at. Another option is to begin by exploring options in business fields you like.

6. How do I find my life's work? You can find your life’s work by making a list of all the goals you wish to accomplish, and by discovering how many of these goals are similar. Keep in mind that your life’s work is something that you enjoy whole-heartedly, and is a continuous goal that you will always be trying to work towards. It should not be something that can be achieved quickly.

7. Be able to connect who you are with what you do: Once you know your life’s work, it is now time to go out there and discover the business opportunities that speak to your ambitions, values and interests. Remember, when you like something and are truly good at it, you will soar to fantastic heights.

The bottom line: Use these seven key points as a guideline to get yourself on the right track. Love what you do, put everything you have into it, and let success find it’s way to you through your wise decisions and passion for your work.
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Robert Moment is a small business coach and author that specializes in teaching entrepreneurs how to turn passion into profit and successfully start a small business. Visit HowToStartYourSmallBusiness.com and take the FREE 7 day e-course titled, “Turn Passion into Profit”.

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