The number one thing a business can do to be more successful in 2010 is to develop empathy for the customer…in other words, to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. People have a lot of choices these days on where to buy products and services, and they choose a vendor based on the total experience not just lowest cost. As business people, our job is to deliver a better overall experience than our competitors.
How do we learn what they are looking for, what they consider a ‘good’ experience? We ASK them. We ask them beforehand, where possible, what they would consider to be a successful experience using our product or service. We ask them afterwards how we performed, did the experience live up to their expectations? If they say ‘no’, then we make changes. If they say ‘yes’, we ask for referrals.
If you are completely content with your 
circumstances, this post is not for you. As the Aussies say, ‘Good onya, Mate!’ For the rest of us who have still not achieved everything we want to do or be, then read on.
There is one, and only one, secret to being a winner…and it isn’t inherited wealth, brains, or good looks (although those probably don’t hurt). The true secret is that you must take action. And that action must be different from what you have been doing. Why? Because what you have been doing hasn’t worked, or else you would have stopped reading after the first sentence.
Based on the laws of physics, change requires action. It’s called inertia. Something at rest tends to stay at rest; something in motion tends to stay in motion. Think about a baseball when thrown by a pitcher. It leaves his hand at a certain speed and stays approximately that speed until it lands in the catcher’s mitt, or…and here’s where the action comes in…it is struck by the bat and goes sailing out of the park.
A change took place because an action took place. So the takeaway on this is if you want to change the direction of your life, you must take action.
Since we tend to resist change because of fear, we have to step out of our comfort zone to make this happen. The fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of being laughed at all tend to keep us glued to one spot. But consider this, successful people would never laugh at us for trying to accomplish something. It’s always the losers, who are going nowhere with their lives, that try to hold us back. Ignore them.
The story of Joanne Rowling is a good case in point. A young, divorced, single mom, living on welfare, decided to take action. Whenever she could get her young daughter to fall asleep, she would write. Whether it was in nearby cafes or in her small flat in Edinburgh, she would write. She became depressed and nearly suicidal after her mom died, but she made herself write anyway. She did this for five years.
Barely making ends meet, she finally finished her first book. She kept writing while she struggled to find a publisher. Even while agreeing to publish her novel, he advised her to keep her day job, because she would never make any money writing children’s books. She kept writing anyway. She took action, and it paid off.
The Harry Potter series is now a global brand worth an estimated $15 billion US and has made J.K. Rowling one of the wealthiest women in the world.
She could have made excuses, felt sorry for herself, ‘kept her day job’, even succumbed to depression, but she did none of those things. She took action.
Now most of us may not have a worldwide bestseller tucked away in our brains, but each of us has a set of talents and skills shaped by our experiences that is unlike anyone else in the world. That’s what makes us unique. So don’t squander it. Explore it instead. Find out what makes you tick, what gets you excited, then take action, any action, that moves you a little closer to what you’d really like to do or be if nothing was holding back…because nothing is holding you back!
Be a winner…take action!
Sometime soon I will prepare a detailed list of all the very best tips on goal setting. There’s no doubt that if we know what our goals are, write them down, set time limits for their achievement, and then take steps on a daily basis to work toward them, we will accomplish them.
However, I can hear you saying “When will I ever have time to do all that?”, so this post is for you. I’m going to show you how to establish a goal achievement system in less than a minute a day! And surely you can spare one minute per day out of your busy schedule to help you accomplish your goals!
Take just a moment right now and write down just one goal you have for your life. It can be financial, health or fitness related, spiritual, relational, it doesn’t matter. It just has to be something you really want to accomplish in your life. Now write it down. Do it now. You have twenty-five seconds.
Underneath that goal, write down just one task or activity that you will do today that will help move you a little closer to your stated goal. Take no more than twenty-five seconds to think of it and write it down.
If you can go ahead and do the task or activity right now, do it. Otherwise, accomplish it as soon as you can, but it must be done today.
As soon as you have completed the task, give yourself a big red checkmark beside the task. Ten seconds.
There you have it. You are now a One-Minute Goal Setter. Tomorrow, do the same thing, with a different goal. Keep doing this everyday until you have written down all of your primary goals, taking no more than a minute each to write the goal down and record the activity.
Each day, quickly scan your list of goals and pick one that you can work toward that day. Write down the task, do it as soon as you can that day, and give yourself a big red checkmark.
In thirty days, you will have completed not one or two things, but 30 different steps toward your stated goals, the things you have said you really care about. The written part of this, the least fun part for most people, took 30 minutes or less for the entire month, yet look what you accomplished!
By the way, if you should happen to complete two or more daily tasks that moved you toward your goals, write them down under their appropriate goal heading(s), and give yourself big red checkmarks for each one. This log is your scorecard, and you want to grow it as quickly as you can, so write down everything you do that gets you closer to your goals.
Try this for a month or two and then let me know how the One-Minute Goal Setting system is working for you. I think you will be shocked at what you have accomplished, and I guarantee you will love seeing those big red checkmarks stack up. Go for it!
I figured my first blog on motivation would be a
series of tips on ways to motivate yourself and others, you know, generate some heat. But I ran across a guy that blew me away, so I decided to feature him instead. His name is Lt. Col. Rob ‘Waldo’ Waldman, a former ace fighter pilot, and now crackerjack motivational speaker. Go check out his very cool video called Never Fly Solo and see if it doesn’t get you revved up. I haven’t gotten to read his book yet, but I plan to. In the meantime, send me an e-mail (info@masterproblemsolver.com) with ‘Motivate’ in the Subject line and I will forward a link to a white paper Rob wrote called How to Motivate Your Team. It offers an entertaining and informative comparison between a fighter pilot and a salesperson. The similarities are uncanny.
