In honor of the New Year and new intentionslet’s talk about a word we probably all use frequently—it’s a very powerful word, but not in the way you might think.   It’s the word TRY. How often do we use that word in the context of something we are doing, a goal we are setting, an objective we are reaching for?  It’s hard to even write that last sentence without using “try,” as in “something we are trying to do, an objective we are trying to achieve.”

“Try” has become part of our vocabulary, but it limits our abilities to focus on a goal and commit completely to achieving something. As a way to illustrate this, let’s do a quick activity.  If you are sitting down, stand up.  Are you standing?  Now … try to sit back down.  No, don’t sit down, TRY to sit down.  How did that work?  What do you notice?   The bottom line:  You can’t try to sit down – you either sit down or you don’t.

Is that same principle not also true of goals or something we set our minds to – that we either do them or we don’t? We either accomplish or don’t accomplish what we set out to do.  In a take-off from what Tom Hanks said in the movie League of Our Own, “there’s no trying in life.”  (Well, he actually said, “there’s no crying in baseball,” but you get the point!)

The point is that you can’t try to achieve whatever you set out to achieve – ultimately, you either achieve it or you don’t.  Consider how often we either hear others say “try” or we say “try” ourselves.   How much more powerful and accomplished might we be if we took that pesky three-letter word out of our vocabulary?  Here are some examples across a wide spectrum of areas:

• Your kids: from “Yes, Mom, I’ll try to get my homework done before dinner,” … to … “Yes, Mom, I’ll get my homework done before dinner.”
• In a meeting at your workplace: from “I’ll try to talk with them about the project,” … to … “I’ll talk with them about the project.”
• With your wife/husband/significant other: from “Let’s try to spend more time together on the weekends,” … to … “Let’s spend more time together on the weekends.”
• In your life: from “I’m trying to exercise three times a week,” … to … “I am exercising three times a week.”

Do you notice the difference in how the statements above sound when the word try is in them or not in them?

So, here is your challenge: For the next week, don’t just try to do whatever you are focused on – do it without the “try” in your sentence.  Catch others in the act too – have them try to sit down to illustrate your point.  And as always, let me know how it goes!

Last week I asked a friend of mine about his business. He told me that he’d had a pretty good year so far but felt frustrated. For the third year in a rowhe’s falling short of his annual goals but feels complacent since he’s still doing okay financially.  That complacency has led to him making fewer calls, having fewer meetings and doing less business than he’d like.

What’s the biggest killer of business growth? It’s not lack of skills or talent; it’s not a poor business plan or even the economy.

The biggest killer of business growth is COMPLACENCY.

How do you know complacency is killing your business growth?

• You know what to do to grow your business but, for some reason, you’re just not doing it.
• You’ve lost the excitement you used to have for your business
• You seem to constantly hit a plateau in your business but can’t get to that next level of growth
• You set the same goals every month or every year without challenging yourself to get your business to the next level

The antidote for complacency is PASSION. Here are some steps that will help you to get passionate about your business again:

1. Create a 3-year vision for your life in the 6 areas of the life wheel below:

   
   

   [caption id="attachment_2517" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="Don’t get too detailed. Spend about 90 minutes and create a compelling future by writing a paragraph or two for each area."][/caption]

   
   

2. Rate yourself in each area. Where are you compared to your vision on a scale of 0% to 100%? If you’re at 80% or above in each area, it’s time to create a new, more compelling vision.
3. Define 1-2 goals in each area that would get you closer to your vision. Goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistically high and Time targeted).
4. Document your emotional “why” for the highest priority 2-3 goals on this list. Your “why” should include how your life will change if you accomplish the goal. What are the rewards of achieving the goal? What are the consequences of not achieving the goal?
5. Create a detailed plan for the top 2-3 goals. This plan should include specific action steps and target dates.
6. Read your 3-year vision daily to keep your excitement about the new, compelling future. Find other ways to keep the vision in front of you.
7. Update this vision annually.
8. Update your goals as needed.

Have you been complacent and found some ways to regain your passion? If so, I’d love to hear how you did it.

Are you complacent now? I’d love to hear how it’s impacting your business and/or what you plan on doing about it.

They say what you don't know won't hurt youbut nothing could be further from the truth when you run a small business. If you operate based on "gut instinct," or you make assumptions on how your business is performing without knowing the facts, you can run into problems quickly. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. By monitoring a few key business metrics, you can quickly gain a handle on your business and start on the path to improving your profitability.

Business Metrics

Business metrics, or measurements of business activity, have long been seen as the exclusive tool of the pure number cruncher, the bookkeeper, and the statistician. That's no longer the case. In today's increasingly flooded marketplace, the mantra must be: "You can't manage it if you can't measure it." By defining the metrics that are important to your business and monitoring them closely, you gain three key benefits:

• Focus. Defining the metrics that are most important to your business allows you to tune out everything that isn't related to those key measurements. As a result, you'll find that you and your business are much more efficient.

• Better Vision. Companies that monitor metrics can spot threats and opportunities faster than companies that don't. Your metrics will give you keen insights into what's happening within the four walls of your business as well as overall trends in your industry. Working with a cyber security company can ensure that your business is protected from the latest cyber threats. These firms have the knowledge and the experience to keep your business safe online.

• Better Decisions. Metrics provide a framework for making business decisions. With the numbers in black and white, you can make well-reasoned decisions on how to proceed. If it improves your key metrics, consider it. If not, move on.

Implementing Metrics

Getting started with metrics is easier than you might think. Many small business owners fail to understand how simple it can be to collect and analyze these important numbers. A simple seven-step process gets you started.

1. Define Your Goals. Make a list of business goals. Goals might include sales objectives, target profit margins, or success at signing up new customers.
2. Define the Metrics. For each business goal on your list, write down a metric that will help you track your progress to success. For example, if your goal is signing up new customers, your metric might involve stating the number of meetings you will have per week with perspective customers.
3. Benchmark Current Status. Now that you established your metrics, you need to measure them. You must determine exactly how your business is doing, even if the truth is hard to swallow. By establishing the current value of each metric, you will be able to track your improvements in the future.
4. Put in Place a System to Monitor and Report Metrics. You may need to add new business processes that will help you calculate and report your metrics. For example, is the number of your customers who view your customer service as being "excellent," then you may want to survey your customers every month and ask them how you are doing.
5. Communicate Metrics with Employees. Once you've defined the key metrics that are important to your business, be sure to let your staff know. Then, everyone can make decisions that help improve the metrics.
6. Review the Metrics and Make Decisions. When you import data of different businesses, you have greater insight into which strategies work and which don't. Review the metrics and take steps to improve your results. Promote Successes. When your metrics improve, let your staff know and reward everybody that helped make things better. Keep also in mind, that data visualization software helps businesses make agile and timely decisions through deep analysis of raw data for insights.

Effective use of business metrics can have a profound impact on your business. As you gain a better understanding of your business and move closer to achieving important goals, your day-to-day work will become easier and your staff will be more accountable to the metrics that matter. You'll make better decisions, based on data, and you will have a powerful new tool for managing your business. Check out the top seo tools you should consider according to Indexsy.

As the new year starts and we question what we are going to do and how are we going to it in 2011it pays to keep our perspective on what service we are providing and then set goals accordingly.

One main purpose of goals is to set a plan in place that will help the goal setter achieve his purpose of serving others. If we analyze the purpose for any business or person it is to serve others in some way. It may be counterintuitive but before someone makes a decision to go forward on a goal in their life or business, the question should be “What will serve my or our purpose best?” In other words, how will the results of a stated goal serve the overall purpose of the individual or organization?

Here are some questions to begin the process:

• What things are getting in the way of our purpose?
• What results will serve our purpose best?
• How will we achieve those results?
• What specific goals must we set to achieve those results?
• How will the achievement of those goals serve all of our stakeholders, including family, friends, community, employees, vendors and customers?
• Why would the achievement of these goals be important to our stakeholders?

Once you have answered these questions it should become clearer as to which goals will provide the best pathway to service.

In summary, if we can clearly identify what our particular service is, then it becomes easy to identify what goals we should be working on and eliminate all those that do not align with that purpose.

What are your thoughts on the concept of your service and the goals you are planning in order to move toward its realization?

John Assaraf has been a leader in understanding how to use the most recent brain research to retrain the brain to work in our favor in creating healthwealth, and happy relationships. Since appearing in the Secret, he’s been a featured writer, speaker and thought leader.

This video is a great explanation of how our inner attitudes and habits influence our behavior. He talks about the parts of the brain that hold us back and how we can override ‘past programming’ and be drawn into a future that we envision. This is exactly the process I use with business owners and their staff to transform and up-level the organization into a new level of performance. Both John and I include extensive work on goals, repetition, affirmations, positivity, action and focusing on the things you want to bring into your business and life. Focusing on problems, scarcity of resources, and negativity just brings more of it into your life.

Click the image to see the video:

I hope you enjoy this video. It could offer a major turning point in how you take control of your thoughts and emotions to lead a more fulfilling life.

Four Frequent Business Problems Expressed by Many Small Business Owners that Business Coaches Help You Address

As you’re reading through the following problemsthink about how help with strategy, tactics, accountability and results could mitigate these problems.

The ‘I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know’ Problem
The ‘I Don’t Know Where to Start’ Problem
The ‘I Can’t Seem To Get Anything Finished’ Problem
The ‘Comfort Zone Upper Limit’ Problem

It doesn’t matter if it appears to be marketing, sales, management, leadership, innovation, or getting your product or service created and into the hands of your clients. It’s basically these 4 problems.

The ‘I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know’ Problem

If you ask better questions, you get better answers. But what if you don’t know the questions to ask? For instance: How can you make emails easier if you don’t know that autoresponders exist? How do you know how you can be part of a more appropriate networking group, if nobody has told you who to ask or even if one exists? How can you create a great proposal template if you haven’t had the benefit of seeing some options in use elsewhere?

If you look at all knowledge as an ever expanding universe, you know about a pinprick of it. You know that you don’t know about a thimbleful. (You know that Chinese exists, even though you don’t know how to speak it.) But that leaves the rest of the universe of knowledge that you don’t know that you don’t know. We need someone outside ourselves to share what they know that we didn’t even know to ask about.

The ‘I Don’t Know Where To Start’ Problem

Sometimes I’ll have a client who says I have to do this and I have to do that and then she adds about a dozen more things, gets totally overwhelmed with the work, the choices, the mounting dollars she imagines it’s all going to cost, and then says ‘I want to escape and do nothing’. She doesn’t know where to start, how to take things in small pieces in sequential order (even though it’s not clearly sequential), put one foot in front of the other until more and more gets done. She doesn’t remember to keep the long term goal out in front of her, remember her purpose and passion and why it’s all worthwhile.

This client needs a coach to ask ‘what is the next step? Let’s just do the next step.’ For instance, get a focus group together and ask questions about your marketing or your service, then write it up in language the prospect uses, then use that wording to write the website, then create a video using the same wording, and then build it into a seminar. Often the chicken and egg syndrome can throw some people for a loop until they just get started. A coach gets the process started and nurtures you along the way.

The ‘I Can’t Seem To Get Anything Finished’ Problem

Accountability is a big word in most people’s vocabulary. We all get distracted. There is so much to pay attention to, emails, customer requests, website updates, banking, deadlines for this and for that. Do you start a project, get distracted by a client emergency and then never get back to it? So something is half done and never really sees the light of day. All the effort you’ve put into it so far is wasted if you never roll it out. How often do you put a lesser priority on strategy, growth and proactive initiatives? That’s what will propel your business forward. If you’re working with a business coach, you’ll be held accountable for what will really get you to the next level.

The Comfort Zone Upper Limit Problem

Why is it that people who win large amounts of money in the lottery blow it all in 3 years or less? Why is it that Donald Trump can go into bankruptcy and then get it all back in just a few years? Why do small business owners hit a ceiling no matter how hard they try to get to the next level? Why do highly paid pro basketball players seem to have everything and then blow it with drugs and crime? We all have comfort zones, levels of success that we’re used to, levels of abundance that we think we deserve before we start feeling guilty or undeserving (and then psychologically self-sabotage). Often these are set in childhood. Sometimes we can handle just so much positivity in our lives and then we start to worry what will go wrong, or start arguing or start blaming? We’ve identified an upper limit (most often unconsciously) above which good thoughts turn to bad thoughts and bad thoughts lead to negative behavior. Sometimes deep inside we don’t feel we deserve too much success because we’re fundamentally flawed, or because we would be disloyal to the less successful people in our lives, or we believe more success would mean a bigger burden, or we can’t outshine a sibling, friend or parent. Whatever the barrier, we set an upper limit. We need someone outside ourselves to understand us, question us and look at us objectively. (Read more about this in ‘The Big Leap’ by Gay Hendricks)

I mentioned Strategy, Tactics, Accountability and Results because these are the pillars of the STAR Burst program that I’m currently rolling out. Now is a good time to start planning for 2011. It’s a good time to get help with the Four Frequent Business Problems. Please look at the program description on the side column to read the stories of people who have achieved great things using me as their business coach. Send me an email for a conversation or give me a call to find out if this is right for you.