Do you know why cars have several gears? Because each gear is needed for different circumstances. Reverse is, well… for reverse. Lower gears give you more torque which comes in handy when you’re on steep inclines. Higher gears help you lower your engine’s RPMs which increases your miles per gallon which saves you money. Some cars have four or five gears and some high performance vehicles even have six.

If I were a car, I would have two gears: fast and neutral. To put it another way, if I were a light switch it would have two settings; on and an off. No dimmer switches here folks.

All Or Nothing Will Hurt Your Business

I’ve been an “all or nothing” person for most of my life. This means I charge ahead at full speed at something, whatever it is or I do nothing. I have worked hard to correct this and get myself into more of a steady speed because being all-in or all-out is dangerous for business owners. A client (who struggles with the same thing) asked me why this is a problem. There are three primary reasons:

1. Owning a business is a journey. It takes times. It’s like driving through the Himalaya’s – lots of peaks and valleys. You can’t traverse this terrain at one speed. if you do, you will either blow your motor or never reach your ultimate destination.

2. People with two speeds tend to set unrealistic expectations for themselves. If this is you, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. For example, it is highly unlikely that you will go from $80k in annual revenue to $150k in two months. If you go after this at a manic pace and don’t make it, you will be devastated, blame yourself and want to quit.

3. You can’t change everything at once. While this may seem logical to most of you, us “two-speeders” think we can.

What’s helped me get myself in stride is to tackle one change in my business at a time. It’s not easy for me, but it has paid off.

How To Use All Your Gears

1. Look at your business and determine which goals you need to work on or what changes you need to make.

2. Pick one. Yes, just one because long-term change happens over time. One way to prioritize is to choose something that directly links to revenue. Do you need to change something that is hurting your profitability? Is there something you need to start doing to increase revenue? The beautiful thing is that when you work on one thing long-enough it becomes a habit. When it becomes a habit, you don’t have to think about it, it becomes part of who you are, the thing you naturally do.

3. Progress to something else.

What To Change

You can tackle big changes or little changes. When I work with my clients, I encourage them to tackle little things because they are easier to change and the accumulation of little things ends up having a big impact on their businesses. Here are some ideas:

1. Get up 30 minutes earlier.

I read something in Jeffrey Gitomer’s book Little Red Book Selling that inspired me: “Work while others sleep…I take those extra three or four hours a day and earn more in that time, when most people are asleep, than they do when they’re awake.”

2. Make 1 more sales calls.

If you’re making three a day, make four. Get comfortable with that and then make five. Immediately jumping from three a day to 20 is not sustainable. But you can work yourself towards that over time.

3. Read one chapter.

If you’re struggling with finding the time or mental energy to read many of the great business books out there, read one chapter . One chapter a day. Do it in the morning (see #1 Get up earlier.) Do it while you’re waiting pick up your kids.


What one thing can you work on?

Photo courtesy of gettam via flickr.

Have you read John Maxwell’s book Thinking For A Change?

In it, Maxwell asks a provocative question: “Do you know what most people’s number one challenge is when it comes to making positive personal changes?”

Several answers came to mind:

1. A positive support system is missing.
2. Limited finances.
3. Lack of knowledge.

Here is Maxwell’s answer: “It’s their feelings. They want to change, but don’t know how to get past their emotions.”

Feelings? Really?

I thought about this from the perspective of small business owners. In the clients I coach, 1-3 come up regularly.

1. “My family doesn’t believe in me.”
2. “We’re broke.”
3. “I’m good at _____, but I don’t know how to run a business.”

Yet there are entrepreneurs who have all those things in place and are still not reaching their goals. Why aren’t they? Why aren’t you?

Maxwell proposes that the only way to make positive change is to change the way we think. He suggests that our actions/decisions come from our feelings and our feelings come from our thoughts. He believes that if we control our thoughts, we will control our feelings which will in turn, cause us to make good decisions.

Thoughts →Feelings→Actions.

Our Beliefs Determine Our Success

I agree with Maxwell and I’d like to take this idea a bit further. It is my humble opinion that every action we take, every decision we make stems from not just what we think, but what we believe about ourselves (internal beliefs) and what we believe about the world around us (external beliefs). This is an important distinction because at times, our core beliefs are different from what we logically know. And often, we are led more by our core beliefs than by the objective data we hold in our minds.  Our core beliefs are at the root of our behaviors.

Haven’t you seen this in yourself or others:

• I’m not as smart as _______. =  Declining invitations to work on projects.

• I’m not good at sales. = A low closing percentage.

• God doesn’t want me to be successful = Consciously or subconsciously, this person sabotages their own success.

• I must be perfect = Not taking risks.

• If an employee believes nothing he/she does will impact the company, this person becomes complacent.

Conversely,

• If you believe each “failure” brings you one step closer to success, you will keep trying.

• If you believe you are fully able to overcome challenges, no mountain will ever be too big to climb.

• If you believe in the greater purpose of what you do, you will have a well-spring of energy and enthusiasm.

Beliefs→Thoughts →Feelings→Actions→Success.

Our beliefs drive our thinking. Our thoughts impact our feelings. How we feel determines our actions. Our actions determine our success.

The First Step To Correcting Your Course

Assuming our success comes from our beliefs, it becomes even more important to evaluate our core beliefs – particularly those that are false and limiting. This is the first step to change our actions and increase our success.

If I may, that is my challenge for you this week: Identify the core beliefs that are holding you back.You may be able to name them immediately or you may need to dig a little bit. In either case, knowing what they are will bring you closer to changing them (which I’ll address in upcoming posts.)

What do you think? Or perhaps the better question is what do you believe?


Photo courtesy of Chris Runoff via Flickr

I’ve been thinking a lot about babies. My nephew’s wife is pregnant and so is one of my good friends. I’ve enjoyed seeing their bellies grow and studying sonogram pictures to figure out whose nose the baby has. We don’t have children so it’s fascinating to me.

Several years ago a dear friend of mine was pregnant (3rd trimester) with her first child, a sweet, precious girl named Hannah. I’ll never forget sitting with her one day, talking about her experience being pregnant. We talked about all the physiological changes she was going through, the weird cravings and the raging hormones. She surprised me when she said, “Alicia, I have a confession to make. I’m really scared about bringing this baby into the world. I almost don’t want her to be born because if she stays within me, I know she’ll be safe.”

I wonder if babies in the womb feel the same way. They are warm, sheltered, fed and have everything they need. They are safe.

Then they turn upside down, and through a tremendous amount of pressure and squeezing, they are pushed out into a world of chaos – bright lights, loud voices and cold air. Most don’t like it and proclaim their dismay loudly to everyone in the room.

My friends, we can often be like unborn babies. We stay in the safety zone of the things we know, the things with which we are most familiar. We close ourselves off to new ideas, paradigms and people.

About Change

There are two types of change: the change we initiate and the change that happens to us. Both can be difficult.

The Change We Initiate

Seth Godin, in his book Purple Cow, has something to say about the change we initiate. He says that innovation and creativity are essential business skills and entrepreneurs will fail without them. I happen to agree. The world is changing rapidly around us and that means we need to invest in innovation for our businesses. If we don’t, we will become irrelevant. And irrelevant is exactly what your competition wants you to be.

A great example of an innovative company is Crayola. From changing the names of their crayons to developing washable markers to most recently, creating 3-D sidewalk chalk, Crayola has embraced change which has helped them continue to stay relevant. In fact, they have a team of employees whose sole focus is innovation. In their Supplier’s Guide, Crayola says: “At Crayola we are committed to finding and developing new technologies that enable us to be on the leading edge of providing safe, innovative new products to satisfy our customers. To achieve these goals, we have a Future Innovation Team that focuses on the development of new technology to be transformed into products that fill the Crayola pipeline and fuel the overall growth of our creative offerings.” (Note: I searched for financial data to see if there was a correlation between their newest innovations and financial growth. Unfortunately, financial information is challenging to find as they are a privately owned company. However they earned a reported $675 million in 2008.)

On the other hand, I recently met a woman desperate to grow her business. However, she does not know how to use email. I don’t know why she did not keep up with technology over the years. But I know this, if she had initiated change to learn about computers, she would not have an technological Everest to face today. You see, she had the opportunity to initiate change by learning how to use a computer; but instead, the change has now happened to her.

It’s up to us to move ourselves out of the incubator and outside of our safety zones. And we don’t need Crayola’s millions to do it either. Some cost effective methods are:

• Taking classes
• Reading books
• Watching You Tube and other videos; one of my favorite sites is TED
• Surrounding ourselves with innovative and creative people
• Attending conferences
• Working with an accountability partner
• Joining a Mastermind group
• Reading blogs
• Surrounding ourselves with people who are smarter than we are

The Change That Happens To Us

There is the change that we initiate and then the change that happens to us, change that is out of our control.

Benjamin Franklin famously said: “Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes.” He’s missing something though. My revision is “Nothing is certain in life but death, taxes and change.”

Change is unavoidable. For a blessed few people, life will tenderly transition them into the unknown. But there are times that we reach newness of life only through the squeezing and painful pushing of circumstances out of our control. And when that happens, just like babies, you can scream about it and throw a tantrum. Be angry and mad. But then accept it and grow.

How do you get over your fears of change?

By the way, Trish McFarlane, at the HR Ringleader blog, wrote this fascinating post about the links between creativity, innovation and change.

Photo courtesy of titlap via Flickr.

This afternoon I will do something I’ve never done before. I’m going on a Christian spiritual retreat.

I wish I could tell you more, but I don’t have a lot of information other than it is in Kerrville, Texas, I need to bring a sleeping bag, linens, warm clothes and toiletries. (I remember my Girl Scout leader telling me the same thing on our first big girl camping trip.) Those are the only details I have.

My friend is sponsoring me. She’s driving me there, driving me back and generally taking care of me. She spoke with my husband for a while and I was hoping I could get the scoop from him. But he’s not telling me anything.

For a control freak someone who enjoys knowing what is going to happen and when, it’s a little disconcerting. But – every person I have spoken to who has gone on this retreat gets ecstatic when I tell them I’m going. Their smiles are wide and their eyes get all sparkly. “You’re going to love it!” “It was life changing!” “You will never feel as loved as when you are at the retreat.” And these are normal (whatever that means) people who I admire professionally and personally. So I’m going and I’m excited.

There is something else I need to tell you. No technology allowed.

Yeah. You’re probably reacting the same way I did when I heard that.

Me: “I can bring my laptop right?”

Sponsor: “No.”

Me: “Well I can bring my cell phone right?’

Sponsor: “No.”

Me: …

Sponsor: “This retreat is about removing all the distractions from your life so you can focus on your relationship with God.”

Me: “What if I bring my cell phone just to text?”

Sponsor: …

My family will be able to reach me and vice-versa if there is an emergency, but that’s it. I’m a small business owner, with a soon to start 6-week series of seminars. People will call me, email me, Tweet me and Facebook me. And I won’t be there to answer.

As I struggled to mentally get my arms around being unplugged for 3.5 days I realized something. I have not had a vacation, a truly unplugged vacation since 2006. I’m plugged in during the holidays. I’m plugged in on the weekends. I’m never not plugged in. And as I’m packing my bags to  leave for this retreat, I can’t wait to be unplugged!

So this is good-bye until Monday.

Going dark, Alicia

Photo Courtesy of eirikref

Yesterday was session one of Business Building Boot Camp. Everyone had “ah-has,” including me. My friend and SEO specialist Matthew Egan, @imagefreedom on Twitter, wrote about his revelations in his post “Hey Mr. Big Stuff.” Among other revelations, the rest of the business soldiers (aka participants) discovered they have a few things in common:

• Perfection paralysis -- wanting “it” to be perfect before taking action.

• Planning paralysis -- taking so much time to plan that we don’t do anything but plan. (If you are such a to-do list nut that you write things down that you’ve already done, just so you can cross it off -- you’ll find you’re in good company.)

• Low tolerance for risk -- otherwise known as fear of failure.

When we were discussing perfection paralysis, Dawn Cole, @lettergirl on Twitter and author of the blog Not Going Postal had the perfect prescription for it:

“Get off your butt and do something.”

Um…she’s right.

That’s the cure for perfection paralysis, planning paralysis and fear of failure. It doesn’t come from reading a bunch of books, although that’s helpful. It doesn’t come from talking about what you “one day” hope to accomplish. It comes from doing it.

If you’re happy where you are, then plan away, discuss possibilities with your friends and hide in your cave. You are not my ideal client.

If, however, you want more, if you’re not content with mediocrity, hear this: life is about figuring things out. You’re going to trip, make mistakes, feel uncomfortable and potentially look like an idiot. But eventually, over time you will become a master. Even this kid had to grow some serious callouses on his fingers (which by the way, takes years of pain and blood) before he could knock out this amazing acoustic version of Billy Jean.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgVqX0a49HM

PS -- one of the participants, Lisa Ramirez, said this about fear: “Instead of being afraid, I need to be afraid of fear because fear leads to failure and that’s not where I want to be.”

Photo Courtesy of The U.S. Army.

If you want to succeed, you better commit this quote to memory: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Now, you can decide if you want to be on “Team Ben” or “Team Al,” because no one seems to be quite sure if Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein actually came up with this quote. However, they’re both geniuses, so you can’t lose either way.

You will lose  if you see change as your enemy and fight it tooth-and-nail every step of the way.

Franklin, who went out kite-flying and discovered electricity, would probably tell you change might shock you at first, but it is the energy you need to make things happen. Einstein, who discovered that neither time, weight, nor mass is constant, would surely also tell you that you can’t have stone-carved strategies in a world moving at the speed of light.

One of the most frustrating things I encounter as a business coach is clients who are eager to improve yet unwilling to change. I recently posted this frustration on Twitter.

That was right after  meeting with a business owner who is in trouble. It’s a sad situation really; he is making less than half the money needed to pay bills, never mind making enough money to have a thriving, enjoyable life. But here’s the disturbing part -- input, advice and new ideas were volleyed back at me faster than Misty May-Treanor or Kerri Walsh ever could. Unfortunately, this situation is not unique.

Most of us hate change. But here’s the bottom line: You can’t eat cheeseburgers and milkshakes, sit on the couch, watch TV for hours and “lose weight while you sleep” with some miracle pill. That pill doesn’t exist for weight loss and it doesn’t exist for small businesses either. So before you reach for the placebo, toughen up and swallow these three truths about change.

Three Truths About Change

1.  Just because “everyone does it that way,” doesn’t mean it still works. We used to think the world was flat, too.

2.  Nothing in this world stays the same. Dead things rot. Living things change and grow. Customers’ needs ebb and flow.

3.  If you hold on to “how you’ve always done it” too tightly, your hands will never be open to receive new opportunities.

And if you don’t listen to Einstein or Franklin, take a listen to Sheryl Crow. She knows what she’s talking about, too – when she says “A Change Will Do You Good.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgIjRj5y88

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