You have to make changes in your life in order to achieve the results you want! In fact, if you want results you have never achieved before then you must do things you have never done before. Yes, it will be uncomfortable and the journey may look arduous – yet, you should look at it as an adventure to achieving your goals and dreams!

I hear people say all the time:

1. Life is difficult!

2. I cannot achieve that!

3. I am a procrastinator!

4. I am so stressed!

5. I cannot afford to do that…!

6. I always struggle with that…!

7. Everything happens in threes!

There are many more that you may hear yourself say, but here is the sad part – what you focus on most shows up in your life. The words you use whether intentionally, out loud, internally or in jest, is what you are programming your mind to believe. So, what you say above is directly impacting your results.

You will always struggle if you keep telling yourself that life is a struggle. You will always get tough clients if that’s what you continually say!

EVERYTHING in life is a CHOICE and the choices you make after reading this short article will directly impact where you will be later today, tomorrow and in the future!

Mostly COMMITMENT to themselves and their families. You have heard the cliche “The way you do anything is the way you do everything” and this is true in business and life. What you do in your life you do in your business. Wherever you show commitment you will achieve results! I feel that the majority of marriages fail because of lack of commitment and the same goes for business.

Just like a marriage you will experience some dark days, challenges and at times want to walk away and throw in the towel. It is no different in business! You have to be committed to your success and where you want to be!

Commitment goes hand-in-hand with tenacity and you have to ensure you are totally committed to your family and your business. Some people commit to their business and their marriage fails or they become too committed to family and business fails… you truly have to find a COMMITMENT balance.

It all starts with one thing: knowing what you want the end result to look like! You have heard it before, you have to start with the end in mind – even put more simply, what you focus on shows up in your life – are you focusing on a worthy long term goal? If not, start today by writing down 1, 3 and 5 year goals for where you want to be in your family and in business and stay COMMITTED to achieving them!

I believe that your thoughts completely control your destiny in every aspect of your life. Thoughts are also energy whether conscious or sub-conscious and what you put “out there” will show up in your life. This is very much along the lines of the secret and the law of attraction.

There are some things that are so ingrained in us from childhood, whether it be the habits we received from our parents, siblings, etc. or just key experiences that have shaped who we are today. There are many life experiences as a child that dramatically impact who you are as an adult and how you approach things, even as an entrepreneur. We do cover a lot of this at our Business Mastery – Power in YOU! seminar and will be writing an entire book on the topic in the future.

Your thoughts completely dictate what is showing up in your life right now! At the Business Mastery 1 – Power in YOU! event we train people to be extremely self-aware and self-observant in what you say and what you think about the most.

I hear thousands of different life impacting statements every single day that are hindering people from achieving the success they deserve, and the sad part is most people do not even realize that they are doing it.

Here are a few key examples:

1. I am not good at that.
2. It’s tough in our industry right now!
3. I cannot remember names.
4. I hate looking at my numbers.
5. People never return my phone calls.
6. I am not good at doing videos.
7. It’s hard to find profitable clients.
8. Our business is seasonal and we are slow in…
9. The economy has changed.
10. I don’t like sales or selling.
11. I keep on getting tough clients!
12. I don’t have the success formula.
13. What you teach does not work in my industry.

It’s very simple, until you start reframing these statements you will continue to attract them into your life and business and will keep achieving the same results. Because your mind does not know right from wrong, it will just give you what you say and think about most.

If you say you cannot remember names, guess what, you will never be able to remember names because you keep on reinforcing your mind to think you cannot remember names, every time you say it. The more you say self-defeating statements the more you ingrain them into your being.

There are simple steps you can take to improve the situation and the most important is being self-aware and catching yourself saying or thinking statements that are self-defeating and not enhancing or adding to your life or your business.

When you catch yourself doing it you cannot just switch them automatically and go from one extreme to the other, by saying I am great at remembering names, because your mind will sub-consciously say “bull shitter” and you will revert back to your common belief.

What you need to say is “I am in the process of remembering all names”. Your sub-conscious mind can accept this as it is plausible and the more you say it the more you will believe it, and the better you will become at remembering names.

Now, you can use this in every aspect of your life and business. The more self-aware and self-observant you become about what you are saying and thinking about the more you will increase the success in your own life.

If you are continually thinking about the debt you have or the lack of results, guess what they will continue to show up! You have to really start to reprogram yourself and get into new supportive success statements in all areas of your life.

Be careful though as you do not want to focus on what you don’t want. If you keep on having difficult clients, rather than saying I am finding fewer difficult clients, say I have amazing money making clients coming my way. If you say I am finding fewer difficult clients, your brain is still focused on the difficult clients and they will continue to show-up. In the movie the secret this is clearly explained by the late Mother Theresa who always said she would go to a peace rally but never an anti-war rally – if you focus on anti-war you get war! What you resist persists!

I was at our 1-day Exposure Warrior recently and really took note of how many business owners don’t really understand how to create an effective message to tell people what they do in their business. When someone approaches you at a networking meeting or some such kind of social function, you need to be able to tell them what you do in a very short punchy sentence. In fact, you need to be able to write down what you do on the back of a matchbox. That means it has to be short to the point and informative so people do not to spend large amounts of time understanding what you do!

I’ve put this into a very simple to understand process!

It’s called define, define and find…

The reason why most business owners cannot tell people exactly what they do is because they really don’t know themselves exactly what they do. This is the first define! You need to be very confident and clearly define what product or service that you are delivering, it needs to be crystal clear in your mind so that when somebody else asks what you do, you can accurately portray and let them know what you do without having to spend minutes describing or convincing them of what you do. If they have a confused look on their face after you have introduced your business – then you have a lot of work to do to get your message crystal clear!

Is your business well defined and do you know exactly what product and/or service that you are delivering? It is critical that you get this done in order to define exactly who your customers are and your target audience is?

This is the second define! Once you know what product or service you are delivering and have it well defined, what you want to do for them, and what solutions your products or services deliver to them, then you can go out and find the markets that you are after!

Most business owners and entrepreneurs never accurately define their product or service, the market that they are after and where their market hangs out. In many cases it is like going out from your business every day and looking for clients in all the wrong places – you may be networking, attending meetings, education groups, etc., yet you do not even know if you market that you are targeting even attends these events.

I had a student yesterday sit down and write out exactly who they were targeting. Once they had completed this I asked him what kind of events he was attending, and what the demographics of the people at those events were. He was amazed and realized that the events that he was attending were not where his target market hangs out.

Take the time to define your products and services, which markets you are targeting with them, and go out and find them and hang out in the right areas where your target market hangs out.

Taking things personally is one thing, but how long you hold onto these things is 100% your choice!

You’ve heard many people say I am having a bad day. My question is does it have to be a bad day or can it just be a bad moment, a bad hour or a bad half day? It is truly your choice of how long you hold onto these given situations. In fact, you should be looking at it as not “bad” but what can I LEARN from these given situations?

A good example is when you got to visit a client and you anticipate taking their order or signing the contract, and things do not go the way you thought they would. The client ends up beating you down on price, not giving you the terms that you want, or possibly just not signing the contract and you walk away with no order. For many people they take these situations extremely personally, when you should be truly be asking yourself, what can I learn from the situation and what was my contribution to the given situation? Simple things like the following:

• How can I prepare more effective the next time?
• What research could I have done to improve the situation?
• What needs to be done to ensure it happens next time?

If you have done all of the above and you still don’t get the contract, do not beat yourself up but rather say “NEXT” and move onto somebody who has the greater potential of becoming your customer.

What I really want you to get from this, is that how you approach every situation will determine the outcome and results you achieve. You can either look at everything as a learning situation or experience, take what you need and decide to move on or you can let it destroy your day, week, month, etc! From my experience this will be the demise of your business, the sooner you understand that every situation that arises in your business is because of the choices that you have made the better!

Holding onto things and taking them personally kills productivity, creativity and profitability!

Your WORDS!

It is really important as you start out your journey as an entrepreneur to really have your mindset in the right place. When I talk about your mindset I’m talking about the way that you think, because the way that you think will dictate the results that you get in your business. 95% of the failures that I see in business or with people who are entrepreneurs is that they have stinking thinking. There are some simple things that you can change in the way that you approach things and the most important one is to look at all the experiences or the choices that you make in a positive light. Let’s look at the three words below:

• Right
• Success
• Good

What are the opposites or antonyms of these three words? Yes; wrong, failure and bad! There is one thing that I can guarantee you as you go out and start building your business there will be challenges along the way. It’s how you look at these challenges and the choices that you make from them that will dictate the results and success in every given situation!

So why not look at instead of using the words wrong, failure and bad, replace them with the word learning! You do not know everything when you first start out in business and it’s good to understand that you should not chastise yourself for every learning experience that you have. The most important part is to make sure that they are learning experiences, and you figure out what you have learnt from them in order not to make the same mistake twice.

Taking Things Personally

This is the most important skill that I had to learn in my own business. Recently, I had a few clients write to me that had some challenges with the groups that they belonged to as part of our company. You could simply say that they were disgruntled clients, which to me are one of the most important assets that you have in your business when you are first starting out. A client who voices their opinion is an asset because so many of them never voice their opinions directly to you, but yet they do it in front of other people and this harms your reputation and that of your business. If they voice their opinions directly to you, you could take the corrective action to put the steps in place to improve your business, improve your systems and overall make your client experience excellent.

I could have gotten very upset and have taking things very personally because of what these people had to say. It was also at the start of 2012 and my mind seems to automatically go to the place of WOW! What a way to start the New Year! I started to take things personally, and then I took a step back and said to myself “what am I meant to learn from these amazing clients voicing their opinions to me?”. The learning experiences I took from the situations have allowed me to make structural enhancements, improve selection criteria and systemization of our groups to a new level for 2012, and for that I thank them.

You see it is the way that you think and the thoughts that you have, that will either grow your business substantially or have it struggling and at worst run it into the ground. The above concept is very simple and sounds very easy to implement, my challenge to you is that you catch yourself in the process of negative thoughts and ask yourself what am I meant to learn from this experience, situation or choice that I made, in order to make my business stronger and dramatically improve my relationships with my customers?

Your customers can teach you a lot and one of the most important things to understand is that you need to take your own ego out of the equation, put it aside and listen to your prospects and clients. By listening to them you will grow your business faster and stronger and more sustainable than by not listening and not caring for your clients.

How Long You Hold Onto Things!

Taking things personally is one thing, but how long you hold onto these things is 100% your choice! You’ve heard many people say I am having a bad day. My question is does it have to be a bad day or can it just be a bad moment, a bad hour? It is truly your choice of how long you hold onto these given situations. In fact, taking the advice from earlier in the chapter you should be looking at it as not “bad” but what can I LEARN from these given situations?

A good example is when you got to visit a client and you anticipate taking their order or signing the contract, and things go not the way you thought they would. The client ends up beating you down on price, not giving you the terms that you want, or possibly just not signing the contract and you walk away with no order. For many people they take these situations extremely personally, when you should truly be asking yourself what can I learn from the situation and what was my contribution to the given situation? Simple things like the following:

• How can I prepare more effective the next time?
• What research could I have done to improve the situation?
• What needs to be done to ensure it happens next time?

If you have done all of the above and you still don’t get the contract, do not beat yourself up but rather say “NEXT” and move onto somebody who has the greater potential of becoming your customer.

Well we really want you to get from this, is that how you approach every situation will determine the outcome and results you achieve. You can either look at everything as a learning situation or experience, or let your ego kick in and arrogance take over and not caring about what anybody has to say! From my experience this will be the demise of your business, because without clients you have nothing.

Do you have set week-by-week and month-by-month plans for the entire year ahead or are you hoping that you can just fly by your seat of your pants again?

You have heard many times that if  you fail to plan then you plan to fail. This is a very true statement as many people seldom plan the year ahead and wonder why when they get to the end of the year that they have not achieved the results that they were wanting!

A study was conducted recently at Harvard School of Business where they took a group of MBA graduates and divide them up into two separate groups; one group was to set goals and plans for the next five years and the other group was to do no planning or no goal setting. They went back five years later and interviewed the two separate groups to their amazement they found the group that did the planning and goal setting were earning nearly double that of their counterparts that had done no goal setting or planning.

This demonstrates how important it is to plan and set goals for the year ahead. Yes, you may not achieve all of them throughout the year but at least you have something to aim for. Having no goals or plans for 2012 is like going to a archery range with your crossbow in hand, loading in your arrow and setting up to shoot at something yet there is no target in front of you! So, what do you aim for? There is no bull’s-eye or any surrounding piece of the target for you to judge your results by, you might as well just shoot the arrow in the air and hope that you hit something! This is not the way to operate your business no matter how big or small it is!

Do you see how this relates to your business?

The most important thing you can do is sit down and plan your year ahead. In fact, in my business we have a very specialized 1-page business plan that we use to operate and manage our business by for the year ahead. It is constructed from a number of different documents, and then summarized onto a single page so that you have a document that is easy to follow, simple to understand and that can guide you for the year ahead.

There are many theories out there about the perfect business plan. The way I look at things is that I would rather have a 1-page business plan and a five year vision for my business. Yes, if you’re going to a bank for financing or looking for investors then you need substantially more than a 1-page business plan, but for managing your business and growing substantially in 2012 and monitoring your success, a 1-page business plan is more than adequate for you to guide your success by!

On January 19, 2012 from 9 AM to 2 PM I will be running a 1-page business plan course called Business Plan 101. I will be looking at all aspects of your business and completing very specific documents pertaining to marketing, sales, exposure, operations, systematization, focus and financial. I’ll be sharing all the details of how to take all the supporting documents and summarize them into a 1-page business plan. You will leave the event with a detailed plan of what you need to do for 2012, and your own personalized target knowing what you need to aim for in order to monitor and judge your success from month-to-month for the year ahead!

This course is only done in January of each year and if you’re interested in attending, please contact Karly at our office on 778 – 565 – 4090 or via e-mail at KarlyB@MYMsuccess.com.We have limited space available, at the time of writing this article there were only 8 seats available as the event is limited to a maximum of 30 people. Call now to ensure that you have a plan for 2012 for your business.

Here is the pricing for the event:

1. Non-Make your Mark students: $199.

2. Make Your Mark students: $149.

3. Make Your Mark Pinnacle Students: $99.

[Make Your Mark students are those people who have completed at least a full one-day event offered by Make Your Mark Training and Consulting Inc.]