How far do your roots stretch in your networks? As a business-owners, particularly as a single person enterprise we can feel quite alone and lonely. We may struggle to connect properly with others in terms of gaining support and being honest about how we’re doing and where we might need help. We are social animals and function better in groups, gaining support, motivation and assistance from others. We learn every day both personally and professionally. Our growth is partly dependent upon others. Those we work for, with and those who might report to us. We rely on them and them on us in various ways. Some of these may be apparent and some less obvious. We may even discuss what support we need or want, whilst at other times someone might just notice we need some help and make the offer. Support provides us the sustenance to survive and thrive,
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What holds you back from achieving your goals? We often find this question easy to answer as we can find a heap of reasons, or excuses, why we haven’t achieved what we set out to achieve or complete what we set out to complete. Sometimes it’s US that holds us back. Our lack of self-belief or the limitations we put on ourselves creates a barrier which disables us before we even start! If you were totally honest with yourself, what REALLY holds you back from achieving your goals? If we track back to the source of our situation, we nearly always end up realising it’s a personal issue or reason that stops or prevents us from achieving, rather than the need to upskill or learn something new. If we honestly asked ourselves why we give up on goals or even why we don’t set goals, what might we say? I
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I’ve often reflected on this saying wondering if practice really does make perfect! We know the saying is that if you practice something often enough you will eventually do it perfectly! But will you? I would argue that unless we know HOW to do something, or we are shown how to do something we could just keep trying and continue to do it the ‘wrong’ way, or not the best way that will achieve the result or outcome we want. An example of this was year’s ago when I used to play in the pool team for the local pub in England. I took every opportunity to practice so my skill improved. One of these practice days, I lined up the white ball on the spot and the red ball with the aim of hitting the ball in the top left pocket. I hit the white onto the red repeatedly
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How do you plan? Do you plan? Do you take the easy or the hard option? Do you take risks or are you risk averse? Whether you plan or not, how you choose to do things will depend on whether you want an easy life staying in your comfort zone, with the ‘ease’ of not taking risks but staying in a lane that has comfort and a degree of certainty, or whether you are the type of person who is always thinking outside the square and looking for new ways of doing things, feeling content in taking yourself outside your comfort zone. If you are staying in your comfort zone, is it because you don’t have confidence in yourself to explore new avenues, or is it because you fear what might happen if you take chances? Taking risks or perhaps the hard option may be a sign of having steely
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I recently came across a quote which I wanted to share with you: “When you are resting because you are worn out, you need to remember you are not wasting time. You are doing exactly what you need to do. You are recovering.” Tiny budha This appealed to me for several reasons. The main one being that we all try and pack so much into every single day, otherwise we feel we are wasting time, and not being productive enough. Even if we’ve been busy for a period of time, taking time out to recover or rest still makes us feel guilty. Not only do we work to our full capacity each day, but we try and cram even more in, as inevitably more work comes in and what happens? We still don’t take that time out. It seems ingrained in us that we should always keep going full speed
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We all lead busy lives trying to pack everything into each day, it isn’t wonder that sometimes we fail to communicate with others the best way we can. Often this is because we didn’t hear or receive the information the way it was intended, or we didn’t impart the information as we intended to do. This can cause misunderstandings and friction within teams, between colleagues and even affect relationships with families and friends. It’s all about the send and receive, or transmission and reception. As we rely on so many means of communication nowadays, we have choices and often we make a choice on what means of communication is best only because of ease and speed rather than quality and value. In our busy days, if we took time out to determine how, when, where and what way to communicate with others, we could avoid a lot of grief and
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Slow down you’re going too fast! We all lead such busy lives and often the feeling we get when we’re busy isn’t just being tired or worn out, more of a feeling of being overwhelmed by just far too much to do and not enough time to do it in. All these feelings are everything we don’t want to feel when we want to enjoy the journey and not just the destination. Whichever path we’re taking we know there are challenges, obstacles and barriers along the way, but we hope they are manageable and achievable. But when we have so much to do, not enough time to do it in. When we have other commitments and priorities, whether it be children or other personal commitments, we still want to enjoy what we’re doing and not feel that our job or business is something to be rushed or squeezed in amongst
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As a business owner we need to be mindful of making each day count to ensure that what we are doing or about to do will ultimately generate a new client, sale or income. But how can we ensure this happens and how can we avoid being pulled into the general hum-drum operational cum administrative roles and jobs we still have to do to ensure our business ticks along in the background, particularly when as a single-person-enterprise we don’t have anyone to delegate to and / or we can’t afford to out-source those jobs we aren’t so good at or don’t want to do. It isn’t easy as ultimately we’re juggling many balls in the air constantly and this can be soul-destroying and boring as well as hugely de-motivating and time-consuming. To ensure that everything we are doing is going to lead to a sale or a new client we
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They say a problem shared is a problem halved and that we should write down our problems, break them down and then they won’t be so bad. Some say success is about being a confident person; one who can solve problems! Therefore, being a confident problem solver is likely to be an important part of your success. In our roles as business owners we could all say we ‘help’ people, and in one way or another whether providing a service or a product we do help people. To enable us to help people we enable them to solve a problem or fix something for them that isn’t working. This makes us all problem solvers. Being a good problem solver gives us confidence and can be the catalyst in creating a success business. We may not only be a problem solver for our clients or customers, but we may also be
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There’s a quote by Helen Keller “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow”. What I like about this quote is the positive tone to it. Looking towards the sun and away from darkness. I’m sure like me you’ve all experienced those negative thoughts and worked hard at trying to replace them with positive ones. We are often told we should focus on the positive, but when we feel low, it’s the hardest thing to do. It takes strength to blot out negative thoughts and focus on positive ones. As Willie Nelson once said, “Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.” We know that the only time we have to do anything productive is right now, the present, today, yesterday is gone and tomorrow is yet to come for us to plan a positive outcome. As Lyndon B Johnson said,
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