Whether personally or professionally we all want to earn a great reputation for what we do and don’t want to lose that reputation, but how can we do this and what happens if something happens to affect this? We know that bad news travels fast, no-one wants to hear good news. And there’s the old adage, there’s no smoke without fire. Nowadays, a bad review or comment can hugely affect a business and hurt business owners too. We can work tirelessly as business owners to ensure we keep a great profile and a good reputation and there are a few things we can do to help us do that. Retain clients – as business owners we are of course wanting to generate income and grow our businesses, however, it’s not always about just gaining or acquiring new clients. If we don’t look after the clients or customers, we have then
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We all say we are listening to others’, don’t we? However, are we just hearing and what’s the difference? Hearing and listening may seem very similar, however, there are quite specific differences. Here are some differences for you to ponder. Perhaps you can see how much you really listen or are you mainly just hearing. HEARING is a passive process whilst LISTENING is an active process. HEARING does not require an understanding of the other person whilst LISTENING depends on the person really understanding what the other person is meaning. HEARING is easy requiring little if no real effort, whilst HEARING requires a degree of concentration, focus and attention of what the other person is saying and meaning. We can go through the physical process of hearing a sound or what someone has said, however, listening involves us understanding and responding to what we have heard and being empathetic of
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I’m sure you like me have gotten to the stage when you’ve just wanted to give up. You’ve picked yourself up several times before and there becomes a time when you feel it’s just not worth getting up again just to be knocked down. The last two to three years has been and continues to be a challenge for all of us and at times when things are tough and challenges feel just too hard and ongoing, we feel like giving in and giving up. But why do we give up and is there a way in which we can help ourselves by developing strategies and tools to protect ourselves from feeling like we want to give up or give in. Below are some examples of why we might feel like giving up – see if any of them resonate with you. Expecting quick results or quick fixes Lack of
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Are you a good listener? I said are you a good listener? Do you feel you hear as well as listen? Do you understand what the difference between hearing and listening is? Do you have good active listening skills? And do you know what active listening skills are? We all think and feel we are good listeners, but how good are we really? We love to hear people’s stories don’t we, however, we are also often bursting to share our story also. Or we are listening to someone and ‘know’ (or assume) we know what they are saying or going to say and so stop listening. And what happens? We have picked up the wrong end of the stick, misunderstood, or worse still gone and done the thing we weren’t meant to or vice versa. Recognise the story? I believe we can all improve our listening skills and focus more
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We are all on a journey, that we know, and the paths are many and varied, that we also know too! However, how we choose which paths, when to take them and how we go about choosing them is another thing altogether. Today I wanted to encourage you to look at this a different way to consider where you are on your journey and are you where you thought you would be and if not, why not. Do you have a clear plan of where you want to be, or not? Have you chosen wrongly in the past and are somewhere you didn’t want to be? Do you know how to get yourself from where you are to where you want to be? And have you got the courage, confidence and clarity to get you there? So many questions – but let’s look at this as being in rooms rather
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We know that perception is different from reality, but for some, perception IS reality. How can we determine the difference when we are seeing and feeling things so strongly? Perception is how we perceive and understand something. Reality is the real truth, the fact and the actual existence of something. Perception is how we see the world Reality is how the world is Let’s look at the difference between them both. Perception: How we see something which can vary from person to personIt is the product and outcome of what we know, our knowledge, attitude, values and beliefsIt is subjective in that it can be right or wrong, positive or negativeIt’s our choice as we see and feel it Reality: It is factual, the truth, something that exists and is tangibleIt doesn’t depend on people or is it affected by people; it is always right with no middle groundIt can’t
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It’s always an interesting question to ask people when asked what they think leadership is or means, and what it means to them. Pause for a moment before reading on and write down just ONE think that you think leadership is. Then ask yourself what type of leader you would like to be and what skills or attributes do you currently have to help you in this role and write them down. I thought it would be helpful to clarify what traits a good leader has or should have and how this manifests itself to others around them. Perhaps you could go through the list and see if these were on your ONE word above or are amongst the ones you wrote down above. There are three large and key qualities a good leader has which I’ll focus on first. The first one being integrity. Being a person who is
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I came across a quote recently which read “A 90 second pause is the difference between a reaction and a response”. Not sure if you’ve ever even thought of the difference between a reaction and a response in any great detail before or not, but it led me to realise there is a big difference in that a reaction might typically end in a bad outcome, where is a response is likely to have a better outcome. This led me to further think about how often we do stop or pause and think. About what we are doing, want to do, or how we might react or have reacted in the past, and whether after a 90-second pause a response providing a more favourable outcome would have occurred. Either way, taking a pause to think, consider or ponder before responding or reacting could prevent conflict, an argument, making a wrong
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If we set goals that are unachievable, we will fail. Yet we constantly set goals, health goals, business goals, personal goals with the aim to do more of the good stuff and less of the bad things. However, if we don’t have a system in place or at least develop a system then we are unlikely to achieve our goals. What is the difference between a goal and a system? A goal is the outcome of measurables, whereas the system is the way in which we will go about it. Similar to actions only in a procedural way. There is a difference between achievement and effort too. We may not completely achieve the goal, however, if we have given it our all, everything we could have, then surely the effort needs to be acknowledged and recognised, rather than the goal itself. If we wanted to train to run a marathon,
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We all want to make changes but sometimes can’t get started or don’t have the energy or motivation, so do nothing. Small changes CAN make a big difference?Isn't it time for a change? Did you know that? Making small changes can make a huge differenceIncorporating a tiny margin for improvement in everything we do will be noticeableBreaking tasks or activities down to make these small changes will help us improve one percentMaking small adjustments mean our improvements accumulateWe often underestimate the importance and the value of making small improvements on a daily basis Sometimes we try too hard to make massive improvements over a short space of time and that by doing this it will create success, or we will be successful, however, it’s the opposite that works. You might think that 1% is so small and such a tiny improvement and so insignificant why bother, but in actual fact,
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