Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

Thinking, writing, business ideas … You're only a stranger once.

Images & Words: Are You Ready to Make Opportunity and Change the World?

Filed Under Inside-Out Thinking, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 2 Comments

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When I started blogging in summer 2005, I wanted to keep the writer’s discipline of writing every day. No one could have predicted, that it would lead me to several blogs, a fabulous business partner, a conference and consulting business, and place in a fabulous community. When I started photographing the sunrise in spring 2011, I wanted to keep a writer’s discipline of remembering to look out my window every day. The photos are starting to write stories with me. Now I’m starting to wonder where that will lead …

How to Make Opportunity and Change the World

Our businesses and our lives are in a constant state of change. We can try to tie things down, keep things where they are. It’s a battle that we’ll never win. On the other hand, they say some things never change. And the more they change the more they stay the same.

Change is like the rain. It’s not good or bad. How we see it is what makes us think that.
Do you see change as a problem or an opportunity?

See the opportunities.

Do you live in the sun or the shadow?

It’s your choice you know.


Do you see the clouds on the horizon …
or the color beyond them?

Maybe it’s time to move your focus.


Sunrise looks empty without the clouds

Notice how everything contributes.


Sunrise – sometimes it’s where you look for it.

Find and define new ways of seeing things.


Carry a sunrise in your heart today!

Shed light on the good things that you can make happen.


Problems and opportunities are the same things seen with a different attitude.
The minute we quit fighting a problem it becomes an opportunity.

To make opportunity, we need to trust enough to see what we’re not yet imagining.
To change the world, we probably should change how we see what’s wrong with it.

Are you ready to make opportunity and change the world?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Break the Conspiracy to Build a Peak Performing Team in 2012

Filed Under Business Life, Inside-Out Thinking, Successful Blog | 1 Comment

Don’t Be Led Astray By the Conspiracy of the Team Player

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of the “team player” and the one time I had the outstanding pleasure of playing on a true team that built a business. I built a team or two and saw them dismantled by situations that undermined and contradicted true collaboration.

Why is that we do so much talking about being part of “the team,” when the underlying message is something different?

Think about it.
We learned to walk, talk, eat without benefit of a team.
No team could teach me to balance a bike or tread water to save my life.
Anyone who’s tried to pass on their experience at any of those skills knows that we learn them individually.

At school, we get individual report cards.
We get graded or assessed on our own performance.
We’re not supposed to share our homework.
We graduate as one person.
Our job applications are about what we as individuals have done.

We get hired alone.
We get raises and reprimands on our own.
We get an individual performance appraisal — it might speak to our team’s performance, but the rest of the team isn’t in the room.

And when we get fired, “the team” is told not to talk to us.

Where’s the team in all of that? What is a team anyway?

How to Break the Conspiracy of the Team Player to Build a Peak Performing 2012 Team

It’s a conspiracy that we ask people to be team players in situations that don’t offer a team. To break the conspiracy, we have to shift our thoughts to the community that is the team by valuing their contribution more than their job roles.

A true team is a group of people with complimentary skills who coordinate, delegate, and collaborate in ways that enable each person to invest peak performance moving the team forward to it’s highest goals. Great teams, like great leaders, are self-aware in that they know what each person should be doing more of and what each person should be doing less of — how each person contributes to the strongest team. When the team loses or adds a team member the team looks to fill a skill set that the team needs to be even stronger at what they do. Leadership is a quality shared by every team member no matter the level or area of expertise.

How do you get to a team like that?

  1. Hire leaders who share your values. Look for self-aware people who know their skills and have their ego intact. Leaders want to build something they can’t build alone. People who share your values will choose the same decisions as you will.
  2. Hire to the team. Don’t hire individuals. Hire one high performer and determine the key area at which he or she excels in his or her given job role and focus that role to take advantage of that. Then look for the additional skills in your next hires. In other words, adjust the job descriptions to enhance the performance of the best talent you find.
  3. Build out the team the same way. When a someone leaves the team, pull out the existing job description and have the team compare it to their own existing skill sets. What skills on that description are already covered well by two or more people on the team? Rewrite the new description to balance what you’ve got. For example if your marketing person leaves team and everyone on the team is social business savvy, write the new job description to find someone who “gets” social, but “lives” marketing data and analytics.
  4. Expect true team behavior and incentivize it. Lay out your goals and hold a quarterly appraisal for team performance that is tied to earnings. Move the team to solve their own problems ciollaboratively in the same the build their budgets and strategies. High performing teams thrive when they have
    • common goals — an agreement to work to achieve the same mission.
    • open communication — honest sharing of information that allows the team to move things forward efficiently
    • shared values — an agreement on what defines the standards of good behavior and good work
    • commitment to the group — every member inextricably bound to the team’s success
    • processes that support a culture of teamwork — the focus is on great performers who attract and nurture other great performers, because they’re truly fans of great performing teams.

    5. If it’s your goal to build a true team, trust the great performers you already have to help you start.
    Be a fan of great performers who are fans of great performers. Ask them what they need to perform at their peak and give them as much of that as you can. Constantly remove roadblocks and keep finding ways that they can do more of what they do well and less of what they do only adequately. Encourage everyone to notice others’ strongest skills and how the team might better use them..

    How will you break the conspiracy of the team player to build a peak performing team in 2012?

    Be irresistible.
    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz on your business!!

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    How to Be Bigger than Fear and Get on with Success

    Filed Under Inside-Out Thinking, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 12 Comments

    FDR Was Right

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    When I told the story of my mom yesterday, friends and colleagues commented on my courage — courage in telling my mother’s story, courage in putting down my cigarettes, courage in sharing out loud what might be choices that other folks don’t see as I do. I wasn’t afraid to tell the story. I had already lived it. It was true.

    The thought kept occurring to me that every time people have accused me of courage has been a time when in my mind I saw no other option, a time when my answer to act was the only right answer I could see.

    I don’t know that I know much about courage. Rare has been the moment that I had to muster up the nervous energy to take on a cause that I didn’t believe or to face a giant who would crush me to smithereens.

    What I know about in these years of taking on the responsibilities of a family, a mortgage, a business, and decisions that would affect other people’s incomes is more what I’ve learned about fear.

    And what I’ve learned about fear is that FDR was right.
    And that understanding fear is the key to success in business and in life.

    Be Irresistible and Fear-Less

    We’re facing times not unlike those that followed the Great American Depression. If history repeats itself, it’s worth paying attention to what happened then, when my dad started his business, when FDR gave his First Inaugural Address and said …

    This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

    FDR’s words resonate for me. In times of learning to build a business, in past worries of whether I’d be able to pay the rent, fear was the enemy that tried to undo me.
    Fear of failure.
    Fear of losing.
    Fear of doing nothing and doing the wrong thing.
    Fear that I might spend a life telling the truth to everyone, but lying to myself.

    Fear of finding my best efforts not enough paralyzed me. Fear of commitment enticed me into procrastination. Fear that the world I believed in and the person I was might not exist confused all of my decisions.

    Carrying that fear wherever I went was a burden bigger than any one person could manage.
    Slowly that fear broke down the integrity of the person carrying it.
    Fear made me give away what I valued as if it were worthless.
    Fear made me think that givers never get and getters forget.

    Survival instinct says if the situation isn’t paying off, it’s a good time to move.
    Fear wasn’t getting me anywhere.
    I didn’t like where I was or what I saw around me.
    I didn’t like the kind of people my fear attracted.
    I didn’t much like myself.

    I sat down and did the math.
    I figured out that fear and trust don’t exist in the same space.
    I looked my fear in the face and waited for it to devour me, crush me, embarrass me, or shun me.
    It didn’t.

    I studied my successes. I saw that I’d never carried fear into my success. I’d always gone in knowing I would be, do, and achieve what was needed to finish ahead. It wasn’t that I was stronger, better, or particularly more clever. It was that it crossed my mind that another option existed, except to come out ahead.

    I calmly decided I was better than any fear I could dream up.
    I knew that I could out breathe any fear and build something better instead.

    I must not fear.
    Fear is the mind-killer.
    Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
    I will face my fear.
    I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
    And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
    Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
    Only I will remain.
    — the Litany Against Fear from Frank Herbert’s Book Dune:

    I don’t know much about courage.
    I know enough about fear to watch it, learn from it, and let it pass.
    Like the litany says I let it pass over me and through me until only I remain.
    Fear can’t stop me from telling the hard truth gently, pursuing a quest I believe in, or trusting in myself.
    And I’ve learned to recognize my friends by how fearlessly they won’t allow me to fail.

    If “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes” has become a problem in your business or your life, breathe deep. Speak the truth. Trust your instincts. Believe in who you are. And surround yourself with people who will fight you for the right to not let you fail.

    Be irresistible. Be fear-less.

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz on your business!!

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    Find the Genius in YOU –Stop Believing in the Box

    Filed Under Business Life, Idea Bank, Inside-Out Thinking, Marketing, Successful Blog | 6 Comments

    There Is No Box

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    That box that everyone talks about — the one that we’re encouraged to think outside — came to be without a thought. No one decided or built a process called “Thinking Inside the Box.”

    It was an accident, a management issue.

    It’s easier and more efficient to run a school or a corporation of people when we teach, talk, and manage to the group.

    Can you imagine how chaotic a school or a corporation would be if every student or every employee got to decide on his or her own creative version of “what works”?

    So how can we bring leadership to every level and not ignite a mess that makes things worse? In the name of management, we build a bias toward one way of thinking in a sea of creativity.

    Find the Genius in YOU — Stop Believing in the Box

    When many of us weren’t looking, we learned about looking:

    • how to look at things the way other folks do particularly at the things our teachers revealed.
    • how to solve problems and show our work — or how to work them out the way we were shown.

    We learned useful and appropriate skills for working in top-down managed groups:

    • to finish the calculation to the deadliest detail even though we already knew the answer wouldn’t solve the problem we were trying to solve.
    • to paint by numbers,
    • to color inside the lines,
    • to keep our curiosity inside the comfort of the teacher, the goals of the curriculum, and the norms of the group.

    Within those boundaries our thoughts were caught much like a mime stays inside an invisible box.
    And like the invisible box that the mime pushes and touches. The box that we think inside isn’t real.

    The way to start thinking outside the box is easy enough — stop believing in the box.

    Life Without the Box

    The biggest problem with thinking inside the box is that for the mostpart, we’re relying on a model we learned, and so when we “show our work,” we’re really showing how someone else figured it out it.

    Life without the box opens us.

    New mind channels become available — creativity, flexibility, fluency, elaboration, and original thought. We break the habit of always doing “someone else’s work.”. The resources of your brain are freed up. Even better, it’s more fun, once you get used to it, because thinking outside of the proverbial box involves playing with ideas not just thinking.

    DaVinci knew it.
    Einstein knew it..
    Lots of folks with divergent hair do it.

    Most inventors only find the inside of the box to test things after they’re through seeing what they can do. Nothing new is achieved or gathered by staying where everyone else is thinking. And when we do get out of our usual ways of thinking, we land smack dab inside our own genius.

    So let’s get on with getting out of it so that we can get into it.

    Here’s one way to find the genius in you …

    Even new creative, flexible, fluent, elaborative, original thinking needs structure. Let’s use a problem-solution format.

    1. Pick a problem.
    2. Move outside it. You can’t really see a situation when you’re part of it.
    3. Identify your greatest weaknesses.
    4. Look for how those weaknesses provides openings … Ask yourself “how can this weakness be a strength?” If your back is against the wall, no one can sneak up behind you. If you’re smaller, you’re more agile. If you’re unconventional, you’ve got surprise on your side.
    5. Leverage all of those new found strength into a single unexpected opportunity.

    So, if you’re ready, I am. Enough with this introduction, let’s let the games begin. Everyone can think like a genius. It only takes a little practice, and a firm commitment. Throw away the darn box.

    Put together your best out of the box thinking to find the strongest opening. Then check it against what a traditional in the box thinking would do to shore up any inconsistencies. That’s how to use your genius thinking to reveal opportunity.

    Is inside or outside the box more comfortable for you?

    Be irresistible.

    –ME “Liz” Strauss

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    How to Use Strategy to Build Opportunity into Your Life Now!

    Filed Under Inside-Out Thinking, Strategy, Successful Blog | Leave a Comment

    Making Random Decisions Is as Reliable as Luck

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    Get up in the morning, get working, solve today’s problems go have fun is that the way life is working for you? Facing each day with a single-day view will get you through a life or a career, but at the end you may find that many of those days might have put to better use.

    If you think of it making random decisions probably has about the same long-term results as relying on luck.

    Strategy is a longer view, a stronger view, and a more useful way of leveraging opportunity too.

    20 Everyday Situations That Strategy Could Turn to Opportunity Right Now!

    With a mind toward strategy, you can leverage the opportunity in any situation, fix the problem your facing, open the door that isn’t moving and get things working FOR you. Strategy is not some high-falutin’ sort of thinking that only great minds do.

    It’s a method of solving problems. Did you ever want to …

    1. be more visible in your circle?
    2. become the first, trusted source at what you do?
    3. settle a conflict without becoming part of it?
    4. help solve a problem with friend, family or coworkers?
    5. enlist powerful people to your cause?
    6. get sponsors for an event or meeting?
    7. quit a bad habit or change unhealthy thinking?
    8. get out of debt or pay off a loan?
    9. negotiate a new or better position?
    10. get upgraded to a better hotel room?
    11. change how people see you?
    12. raise money for your cause?
    13. get a meeting with someone you admire?
    14. find a new career that fits you?
    15. organize a group trip?
    16. motivate people to join you in something cool?
    17. get a raise you deserve or raise your rates without worry
    18. start doing what you were meant to do with you life?
    19. do damage control?
    20. start investing in a retirement you look forward to?

    Too often we walk into all of the above situations without putting together a system for finding success. A clear strategy could turn any of those 20 (or most other) everyday situations into an opportunity rather than leaving the outcome to instincts and chance.

    What Isn’t Strategy and What It Is

    We use the word strategy as a synonym for the word way or the word plan. It’s not right, but it sounds cool. Bet you’ve heard people say things like this …

    • I’ve figured out how to use two tools to offer a new strategy for making money online.
    • My strategy is to say “yes” and then do whatever I want.
    • Our strategy this year is to focus on growing by 50%.
    • It was a bad strategy to spend money on that vacation.
    • Our long-term strategy is marry well and have a house with a great view.

    Those are not strategies. Some aren’t even decisions or plans.

    Strategy is more and more useful in our lives than most folks expect.

    Strategy isn’t a business tool. It’s not a single goal, or a choice, or good idea, or a description of what we’re going to do. Strategy is a practical system that changes how we view and interact with the world.

    Next time you have a situation that offers a change of any kind bring some strategy with you before you respond. Here’s how to do that.

    • Think about the outcome that you want to achieve — your goals.
    • Think about the people involved and what motivates them — their goals.
    • Think about your position and what you bring that adds value to THEIR goals.
    • Think about what you might offer to align your goals with theirs.
    • Think about how you can turn your what you want — your opportunity into a benefit for them.

    Start by listening to what you know and asking questions to hear more about what they know. Offer a few suggestions that are unfinished, allowing everyone to participate in defining a great outcome. Call the group to action. Then claim and celebrate the agreed upon result! The hardest part is thinking it through before you begin.

    How have you used strategy to build opportunity into your life right now?

    Be irresistible!

    –ME “Liz” Strauss
    Work with Liz on your business!!

    Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.
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