How To Set A Goal And Make It Stick
January 30, 2010
When I speak, I often engage the audience, working interactively. Why? Because I know that the more we engage all our senses (not just our ears) when we hear new material, the more it helps us to anchor that new material within us. I also know that anchored information will more likely be used when we return to our offices. Instructional designers call this “transfer of training.” Proving that what we teach is actually taken and used in someone’s work is the holy grail of professional training.
When you decide to set a new goal for yourself, how do you do it? Do you sit down and make a list? Do you write out an affirmation? Do you simply think to yourself one day while you’re in the car “I need to do thus-and-such” and set out to do it? Whatever your method, you can have a higher degree of sticking to your new goal if you include as many of your senses as you can to help you along.
There are several ways of doing this, and most of the methods I know work pretty well. One that is popular right now is called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT is often used to change our emotional reaction to a certain situation. For instance, if you get nervous speaking in front of people, you can learn to use EFT to say affirmations and tap yourself on specific points of the body. EFT is nicknamed “tapping” because you actually do tap yourself repeatedly at specific spots as you are saying the sentences you construct about your goal — the change you desire. I’ve used EFT more than once and if it is used consistently, it has worked for me. To learn more about EFT, you can contact my friend Annie Wills, at Full Circle Coaching.
I’m going to give you another way to involve your senses and make your new goal stick, though. It is often called VAK, which stands for Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic. I like VAK because it is another way to become an embodied entrepreneur. Simply put, that means that you are engaged in your work with your heart, soul, mind AND body – and you are sure to be quite successful if you can achieve that!
So, to set a goal and put the power of VAK behind it, here’s what you do:
- Write your goal down.
- Close your eyes, and ask yourself “what will you see that will let you know you’ve attained your goal?” Even better, you can give this question and the following ones to a friend and ask them to walk you through this and answer to her, out loud. Take a breath or two, and see what pictures you get, what you’ll see when your goal is met. You will probably get more than one vision. Open your eyes, and write each of them down.
- Again, close your eyes and ask yourself “what will people say to you once you’ve reached the goal?” After you’ve recorded your answer (or had your friend record it for you), try asking yourself “what will people say about you once you’ve reached your goal?” And finally, ask what you would say to yourself when your goal is reached. Record your answers, or have your friend do it for you.
- (This is my favorite part!) Now, close your eyes again. Ask yourself how you will feel when you’ve reached this new goal. Really take some time to let this sink in, and see what feelings arise in you. Once you have a good strong feeling going, ask yourself about the color, shape, texture, and even the temperature of that feeling. Finally, ask yourself where the feeling is located in your body. Record all your answers. Don’t rush yourself, give yourself time to really get into the feeling of reaching this goal.
- Finally, ask yourself what belief you could state about yourself that will help you get this goal. For instance, if you want to lose weight but always snack at night, could you create a belief about yourself that you are able to easily turn your attention from eating after 8:00 PM? Work on this replacing your current belief that it is “impossible not to eat” or “I must eat because I get too fatigued, too bored, or too scared not to eat at night.” In other words, replace your negative self-talk with a positive belief in yourself as someone who is capable of doing what you want to do.
- Be sure to ask yourself if you foresee any reason NOT to reach this goal. If you secretly think that being thinner will be bad in some way you will not reach your goal until you have put that belief to bed. We almost always have a secret reason that we don’t want to do what we say we want to do. I say I want to improve my auditory Spanish skills, but secretly I don’t want to put in the extra half hour a day to do that. So, of course, I don’t! Bring your secret reasons up into your consciousness, and you’ll go a long way to helping yourself get that goal.
The point here is to create a framework around you that helps support you in all your senses. If you have a goal to grow a rose garden, you can close your eyes and envision the layout, the sunshine, the colors, and the smells for sure. The more you can embody your goals, the more you’ll be able to make it stick. Let me know how it works for you.
Does Your Business Suffer From Perfection Syndrome?
January 28, 2010
Perfectionism will kill your business. The goal that you have as a solo professional is to provide a service that solves the problem your customer has. If you do that, you’ll succeed. Notice that I don’t say you have to PERFECTLY solve your customer’s problem. In fact, if you push for a perfect solution you run the risk of putting your customer off, because you will begin to nit pick at tiny little things you are offering, and you’ll lose focus on the big picture.
This thing about perfectionism is controversial to talk about. We are taught to find the “perfect solution” to our customers’ problems. But here’s the thing, and it’s important to remember. Life changes for that customer almost daily. The customer herself can’t really articulate a “perfect” solution. She may think she can, but once her “perfect solution” is in place, things will change and she’ll find that she needs to tweak it a little bit over time.
The big truth is that there IS no ongoing, perfect solution for your own business or for your customer’s business, either. You plan a resolution to an issue and execute it, and after that you see what worked and what didn’t work. You change it around the edges a little bit and go again. Finding what works for yourself or for a customer is not a straight line. It’s a curving line, sometimes curling back on itself, sometimes meandering where you never dreamed it will go. To hold that as true and faithfully watch when changes are needed is the best practice for a solo professional. It’s the best practice for larger businesses, too, but they often become too inflexible and stodgy to execute in that way.
Here are two big problems I see with solo professionals who are trying to establish a business that makes enough money to be viable.
1. Fear of making mistakes, which manifests as failure to take timely action.
2. Trying to decide everything by logic rather than feeling into what might be best for their business or their customer’s business.
I’d much rather see a solo professional try something and fail, and then learn from what went wrong, than to be paralyzed from the fear of failure. Almost all successful business owners have made mistakes, and there’s no sin it in. The sin is in burying the mistake and failing to look at it closely so that one learns. I literally have to re-train a good portion of the clients I work with to actually tell me when something goes wrong! We get into this practice of trying to hide our mistakes, which doesn’t help us in the end.
Additionally, there is a great benefit to using your feeling sense to help make decisions for yourself and your customers. You might also think of this as using your intuitive sense of things rather than depending solely on logic. You can ask yourself a question, close your eyes, and get a gut feel or sense of the best answer. The more you practice this, the better you will get. It is a great addition (and sometimes a replacement) for deciding only by logic alone. In fact, most of the millionaire entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed over the past years tell me that when the chips are down and it’s decision-making time, they trust their gut. Not the figures, but the gut. That’s a great confirmation of using your feeling sense to help you made decisions. Sometimes things will not seem logical at all, but you have a strong sense it is the right path to take.
The truth is that there IS no perfection in this life, so trying to run our businesses from that place will never work. That is the wisdom that successful solo professionals have come to know. the next time you feel yourself fearful over making a business decision, take a breath, check your gut, and move forward. You’ll find that you will do better in the end than waiting for perfection to come.
Add Fun To Your Entrepreneurial Endeavors
January 24, 2010
Lately I’ve run across more than one budding entrepreneur who makes building a business out to be nothing but serious and a lot of 
hard work. I’ve been pondering this a lot. Our energy follows our thoughts. When we hold only serious energy toward anything, it BECOMES hard to us. We fulfill our own expectations. We start believing that there is too much to do, too much to learn, and that we are overwhelmed. Here are just a few examples I’ve run across in the past months:
- It’s no fun to pay attention to weekly income and expenses.
- It’s no fun to carve out the time needed to work on my business, not in it.
The truth is, your business will flourish the more you weave fun into it. When we look forward to learning something new rather than thinking it will be overwhelmingly difficult, we create energy toward our own success. When we hold our work lightly, it feels much less burdensome and hard. We end up with a more positive energy toward the things we have to do. We all know this, but when it comes to our work we sometimes tend to forget it. We think we have to labor at our work, or keep it separate from our fun.
Dread has no place in your life as an entrepreneur. You didn’t set yourself up to be the boss of you just to feel dread toward your work, did you? 
One way to handle feeling too burdened or overwhelmed is to make sure you inject some fun and things you truly enjoy into your business. Tiny pleasures or large ones, they all help you succeed in your work.
Here’s just a small example. I’ve always loved the color turquoise, so to inject a little bit of fun into the work of updating one of my websites, I used it and asked Facebook friends what color to pair it with. I ended up with a dynamic combo of my fav turquoise paired with peach. I love it, and I had fun I had pulling it together. (You can check out the result at suepainter.com.) How fun it was to read the other day that turquoise has been named “color of the year.”
Often I encourage my clients to plan personal retreats to work out their stuck places and to work on their business planning. These are fun despite being productive. Go where you’ve been wanting to go, or return to a place you enjoy. Not only does the prospect of a trip create a welcoming energy, you are so easily able to work on your business rather than in it, getting away from the day-to-day routine. Go by yourself, or pair up with another entrepreneur who also wants to hammer out some work. You can weave breaks into your day, walk on the beach, get a nice dinner, shop. But for the most part, you are giving yourself uninterrupted time to invest in your business. Don’t sabotage yourself by making this a family vacation, either. It’s not – it’s for YOU.
You can also form a small Mastermind group with people you truly enjoy, and meet by phone or in person to help each other with business issues. Make it fun – meet over a good bottle of wine, take a walk, whatever you enjoy. For a while last year, I did this with another entrepreneur by meeting her to water walk and swim together. We’d do that, then get into the warm therapy pool and stretch both our bodies and our views of our businesses.
Do you have staff or employees in your business? In nice weather, try meeting outdoors with a picnic lunch. Just think about ways to bring joy and pleasure into your endeavor. You’ll benefit both in your spirit and your bottom line. Think easy-peasy, not hard. Think mastery, not failure. Think simple steps, not big overwhelming project. You didn’t put yourself in business to feel fearful, down or out. You put yourself in business to serve others and create a world of work that meets your income and lifestyle wishes. Fun will help you get there, even in small doses!
(c) Sue Painter
How To Market Your Product To Women
January 23, 2010
The latest market research yet again points out that women make the majority (about 70%) of purchase decisions for consumer goods. Women are also the fastest growing global market, meaning that even outside the United States women are gaining purchasing clout. So, if you have a business that markets to women it would be good to know about how they make purchasing decisions and how they think about the products and services they use.
Not long ago, an article by Michael Silverstein for the Wall Street Journal posited that most consumer goods and services are developed by men. These men consult with other men to develop products and the marketing for those products. Whether you are male or female, take into consideration a few things about how women buy and watch your sales to women improve.
- Women buy based on the emotional appeal of a product or service. While men do this, too, men are more apt to get into a certain purchasing habit and stay there, not looking around so much for what is new and appealing in the market. Women like to feel good about what they purchase, and will buy on emotional appeal more than on habit.
- Women aren’t so impressed with a company’s decision to cut price when sales drop. We worry about whether the quality of the product has dropped, thinking that something we have previously bought might now be second rate. We notice a drop in product quality (thinner material or less give in the fit).
- Women shop more than men (big surprise, I know). What this does is make us far more aware of what’s selling well, what’s bombing, and where prices have changed. We have a better sense of the market because we are in it more, especially online.
- Women like to know what’s new. If a company makes tiny little changes to their product rather than truly producing something more innovative and easier to use, women are not impressed. We have a great ability to review a product and immediately see what will work or not work before even laying hands on the item. (Again, we shop and compare online.)
- We like to give something that says “I love you.” We look for that more than something practical. Research shows that women say love is important in their lives, second only to time.
- We like color and look for products to give us flair. Men will more often use black and white. While we like the flair and excitement of color and style, men buy based on function, durability, and price.
- Women talk about what they buy. This is a critical factor to remember when marketing to women. We share information personally and online about our likes and dislikes. We connect with other women over our purchases. Research shows that a pleased woman customer will impact at least nine other women to buy from you. This is amazing reach! Word of mouth marketing works with women.
- We like products and services that save time. Cumbersome packaging and hard to use products don’t get the nod.
While these points hold true for any industry, women complain in particular about financial services that are aimed toward the male of the house (even when the woman is the major bread winner), health care services (we don’t like the endless waits) and durable goods (we don’t like that a good portion don’t do what they say they will do). Keeping these facts in mind can help you create and sale to women more successfully than many companies do.
(c) Sue Painter
Could Your Business Withstand A Disaster?
January 18, 2010
The plight of the Haitian people and their country is on everyone’s mind. The images we see on the news are horrific, pulling at my heart. Literally, Haiti will have to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. Even with massive aid from many countries, getting the country set up and the people well will take much time.
Disaster visits without warning and quickly. On a personal level, it could be unexpected illness or the death of someone dear. For your business, it might be flood, fire, or an employee who causes harm. Think about the small business owners in Haiti right now. If their business is in rubble they have no way to make money even if they could offer what their customers need most. If their business was left standing there is no security to protect it. Already, many shops have been looted for their goods. Some shop owners have simply opened their doors and emptied out their shop, giving away everything they have.
Your business will withstand disaster only to the extent that you have systems in place that you can lean on when something goes wrong without warning. While this isn’t a comprehensive list, here are your main concerns.
- Are your business’s assets insured? What would happen if a disaster caused you to lose your office or the equipment you need to carry out your business? You can either buy insurance or self insure, meaning that you have set aside money that could immediately be used to replace your lost equipment and get your doors open again.
- Do you have back-up systems in place, and do you use them regularly? Could you recreate your financial records easily? Are your customer records secure and backed up either physically or electronically?
- Have you thought about how to handle the sudden loss of a key employee? Do you have a comprehensive list of what that person does and how she does it? Do you have a way to get additional help quickly if you lose someone to illness or accident? The more you have your work systems documented in an operations manual, the quicker you can get up and running, back to making income.
- Have you planned how to handle your business if you become unable to work for a while? Is there someone who knows enough about what you do to step up and fill in until you can work again?
If you are a business owner who truly depends on the money you make, it is vital to have answers to these questions. What I see for many solo business owners is that even the slightest disaster shuts them down completely. These owners ARE their business. When they can’t work, there is no income at all. Even an illness like the flu effectively shuts them down. They’ve never thought about alternatives. Often, the loss of momentum creates a negative spiral that the solo business owner never recovers from. Their business just slowly winnows away.
One of my own businesses suffered a mini-disaster over the past few months, in fact. In early December I had major surgery that I knew would keep me away from the massage clinic I own. Plans were fully in place for my staff to take over my own work with clients. My practice manager was prepped and ready to take care of management and administrative work that I normally handle. My start date to come back to the clinic was set. My clients were all informed and taken care of. Well, while I was still in the hospital, the practice manager’s father was found to be terminally ill. She left town and even now has not returned to work. Four weeks after my surgery, I unexpectedly had to have a second surgery due to complications from the first, making it impossible for me to meet my return to work date. One staff member left unexpectedly. Suddenly, I was down to one hard-working staff member and what I could administratively handle by phone. The systems I’ve put in place for that business saved my bacon, and allowed us to continue to serve clients, make money, and handle at least the bare minimum of administrative work. While I used to chaff over the time it took to put operations manuals and back up plans in place, now I am very grateful that I had them.
Disaster don’t have to be as large as the Haitian earthquake to effectively shut your business down. If you want to recover quickly and continue to make money, get your plans and systems in place and review them at least once a year. Your bank account will show the results and your business will suffer far less than those with no planning at all.
(c) Sue Painter
Three Ways To Boost Your Income This Month
January 12, 2010
The new year is off and running already! Is your business off and running, too? I don’t know many business owners who would say no to making more income right now – before the end of this month. Here are three ways to boost your income, and if you implement even one of them, you’ll have extra money to show for it.
1. Increase the number of clients or customers you have. This means letting folks who are new to you and your business know about you and the problems you solve. How can you do this quickly and efficiently?
- Ask existing customers for referrals
- Find a business networking group you’ve not been to before and attend
- Send out an e-newsletter and ask recipients to forward it to one person who might benefit from your services
- Ask friends and family to specifically mention your business to one person this week
- Post helpful resources and advice to your social media accounts
- Revamp any existing paid advertising and look for a higher return on investment
- Partner with an aligned business to advertise or do a quick special promotion
2. Increase the average transaction value for existing customers or clients. This means that you offer more value and get a greater price than you are currently getting from your customers. Here are a few ways to do this:
- Raise your rates
- Bundle several of your products or services together and offer them at a special price
- Create a VIP customer category and charge for access to VIP status
- Offer an add-on to your existing product or service. For instance, if you sell jewelry offer a color consultation (for an additional price) with each jewelry consultation or purchase.
3. Increase the frequency of repurchase by existing customers. This means that you devise options designed to encourage customers to come in more often (or order more often).
- Let customers know the benefit of increased services (massage therapy more often than once a month actually boosts the immune system, for instance).
- Package services for frequent buyers. Personal trainers, for instance, might offer a special rate for those who purchase a quarter’s worth of training three times a week.
- Let customers know about new inventory as it arrives to encourage more frequent visits to a retail shop.
- Point out that more frequent services can lead to faster results
The point is that boosting your income quickly doesn’t take months of agonizing over how to do it. Pick one of the three options that you feel will work best for you and get started right now to implement one or more strategies for it. Income doesn’t increase when we THINK about what we might do, income increases when we actually IMPLEMENT something new.
When clients come to me wanting to increase their income quickly they usually are holding that wish as something that is hard to do, scary, or impossible. One of the secrets to boosting your income is to change your own attitude about how easy it is to make more money. If you take action, it happens. If you worry about how you are going to take action then nothing happens and you continue on the gerbil wheel of “how can I do this?”
Do you want to make more money this month? Go look at yourself in a mirror, smile, and declare out loud “I”m off right now to make a bunch more money this month.” It’s pretty tough to do something you don’t believe you can do, so quit thinking you can’t and start telling yourself you can. The how-to’s are right here for you. Pick one, work on it, and let me know how much more money you have in your pocket at the end of this month. 
(c) Sue Painter