Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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Whose Values, Rules and Ideas Are Running Your Life and Your Business?

Filed Under Marketing, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 4 Comments

Other People’s Values, Rules, and Ideas

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We all grow up to be leaders on someone else’s path.
That’s not a bad thing, but it’s a reality that builds our world view.
We need to learn how the world works … how to stay alive, how to access food, how to win respect, influence, and trust. The first values, rules, and ideas we learn teach us that. They set a foundation for building character, setting boundaries, and making decisions for ourselves.

Our First Values, Rules, and Ideas Come From Our Family

Most of us are born into a top-down organization called a family. Our parents (or older, bigger significant others) teach us about good and bad behavior. At the same time we literally find our hands and our feet. Before we learn to talk, we know some things work and others don’t. We’ve already figured out whether a smile or a crying fit gets us what we want. If we didn’t know that, we’d have died of hunger. As we find our way to standing in the world, values, rules, and ideas help us find the place for our feet.

Family values, rules, and ideas start simple. They come from our caregivers. They sound like “Love your brothers, Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t hurt other people. Don’t yell indoors. Be nice. Do well by doing good. Think.”

We learn to navigate when those values, rules, and ideas conflict.

When my older, older brother was three, he tried to put his hand in the sugar bowl. My mom reached out to slap his hand.
My dad said, “Wait!” Then he turned to my toddler brother and said, “You won’t do that again, will you?”
My older, older brother agreed. But the very next day, he tried the sugar bowl again and my mother slapped his hand.
He said, “I’m going to tell Daddy you did that!!”
My mother slapped his hand a second time and said, “Now you can tell your Daddy I did it twice.”

We learn early to sort whose values, rules, and ideas are more powerful.
It’s a self-preservation skill.

The Next Values, Rules, and Ideas Come From School

At school, we learn to be a leader on someone else’s path. We learn values, rules, and ideas that engage us in a manageable way. Some kinds of creativity and leadership are rewarded because they help the school run better, faster, easier. They give the school more meaning. They make it more fun. Other forms of leadership and creativity are brought back onto the path, because they make things harder to manage. Some behaviors don’t fit.

Conflicting values, rules, and ideas come from the same source.
Some sorts of curiosity are good. Some sorts are disruptive.
Asking why is eager participation in some situations and defiance in others.
Some sorts of helping others are applauded. Other helping is called cheating.

It’s good to ask what would happen if you don’t brush your teeth.
It’s not so good to ask what would happen if you don’t go to “time out” when the teacher sends you there.

Add the exponential complication of the values, rules, and ideas of our peer group.
The simple values, rules, and ideas require interpretation as we get older.
We learn that some rules interpret our actions by what that action “most often means.”

We graduate and fit ourselves into yet another set of values, rules, and ideas.
The more people we meet, the more complicated the values, rules, and ideas become.

Why We Trust Other People’s Rules

The tricky thing is the way our brains build abstract thought. We construct our understanding of values, rules, and ideas through experience. We construct our world view, our basis for making decisions, the same way we construct the idea of blue — it all starts with someone else’s idea of what blue is. We learned our idea of blue by trial and error.


What color is this?
Blue.
No, honey, it’s red.
What color is this?
Blue.
No, dollface, it’s green.

We learned blue by learning what’s not blue at the same time.

We learn what to do by learning what not to do — by doing things wrong — by finding out that our inclinations and instincts have lead us astray.

We learn to trust other people’s values, rules, and ideas more than our instincts.
That’s a problem.

Most of us don’t realize where doing that.
That’s an even bigger problem.
In fact, it’s dangerous — so dangerous, it can cost us our life.

Whose Ideas, Rules and Values Are Running Your Life and Your Business?

How many of your decisions come from habits set years ago and never challenged. If you’ve been feeling like you’re not on the right path, I’m betting it’s because you’re working under some old rules — rules that don’t fit, rules you don’t need.

What are the values, rules, and ideas that run your life and your business? Who inspired them and are you ready to decide which are your own?

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

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Ideas & Infographs: Decisions, Decisions … How Do You React?

Filed Under Infographic, Marketing, Successful Blog | Leave a Comment

by Mihaela Lica

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Decisions Require Intelligence

When it comes to making big decisions, that can often make or break your business, it can be tempting to just go with your gut instinct, Isn’t it? After all, it’s your business and you know it better than anyone, right? Who’s better qualified to make a decision than you? And then, most of you out there have learned how hard this mentality bites too.

In actual fact, the “gut instinct” approach is fraught with hazards, that is, unless your gut instinct is Homeric – the stuff of legend. Face it, people have tendency to let their imaginations run away with them – we have all these plans and ideas and we can picture everything in our minds working out perfectly, accordingly – even in the most dire situations. Our judgment can so easily become clouded, as we get excited and think too far ahead of ourselves. Consequently, we make rash decisions that usually backfire on us.

So, decision making big or small, requires intelligence. No, not you turning into Albert Einstein, but the kind of business intelligence that can be gleaned ever more effectively in our digital work and playground here.

[Click the image to see the infograph full size.]

Business Intelligence Consumerization

Created By DomoTechnologies, Inc.

Business intelligence is far more accessible now, than ever before. As the above infographic courtesy DOMO (http://www.domo.com/what-we-do/additional-resources/8/82#featured) above shows, business intelligence, in the form of highly visualized and easily accessible data, is quickly becoming a vital resource for internet entrepreneurs. Check this out.

Having access to business intelligence is critical to your success. Unless you have a crystal ball, you simply cannot predict the outcome of those key decisions, no matter how well you might think you know your business and your consumers. The message is loud and clear – don’t act impulsively, get the facts first. That’s what everyone else is doing – so think about competing.

—-

Author’s Bio:

Mihaela “Mig” Lica founded Pamil Visions in 2005 where she uses her hard won journalistic, SEO and public relations skills toward helping small companies navigate the digital realm with influence and success.

You can find Mig on Twitter as @PamilVisions

Thanks, Mig!

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

What Three Values Drive Your Brand?

Filed Under Business Life, Community, Marketing, Successful Blog | 8 Comments

10-Point Plan — The Brand Values Baseline Defined

Three Reason Get Us to the Task at Hand

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Now the core team returns to discuss the feedback from the stakeholder leaders who’ve helped them identify the brand values baseline. Review the words each group has returned with and talk through the meaning until the group can roll up the short list to three words that stand for the foundational core values that drive the business. Try one from the head, one from the heart, and one from the long-term vision or meaning.

An example might be these three that drive SOBCon:

Delivering brilliance: We believe in intelligent, elegant connected ideas that raise us up to higher thinking.

Trusting fearlessness: We believe in authentic trust in ourselves and others that has no room for fear as it stand with our intelligent ideas.

Deep Strategic Vision: Our quest and our purpose is to move ourselves, our businesses, and those around us forward with leadership born of strategy and deep meaningful purpose.

Or Brilliance, trust, vision. Those three words wrap up the sentences and make the an easy reference for every decision that drives our business. Other people on the core team can choose their synonyms and as long as they mean the same thing, we can trust in the variations and the mutations that will grow from them.

We have our values aligned.

What three values drive your business?

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Sorting Is a Breeze, a Day at the Beach

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 11 Comments

Thoughts that Say Easy . . .

I love those idiomatic phrases that mean things are easy …
Easy as pie …
It’s a piece of cake.

My most favorite of them are …
It’s a breeze. . . .
a day at the beach.

I use them when things get stressful or hard, especially when my head gets too filled with details and options.

When I have too many options, those last two idioms help me sort them. A breeze and beach conjure up images that let me sit back for a thought, no matter how busy or anxious for answer the world is.

I imagine a day at the beach where the sand and the sky are big and open. No clocks or buildings interrupt a chance to spread out my thoughts. I need to see the spaces between the options to know what I’ve got and sort them.

A few well-spaced thoughts and I remember that my life is my creation. I’m in charge of valuing the options. I choose the path, the curves, and the interactions. When I listen to what I know, seeing where I am and I’m going is easy. It’s a day at the beach drawing possibilities in the sand.


How do you sort too many thoughts and options?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Image: sxc.hu
Image: sxc.hu
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Why It Takes a Personal Plan to Be Outstandingly Successful

Filed Under Business Life, Inside-Out Thinking, Successful Blog | 14 Comments

Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan

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The road to success — We’ve all heard of that one. Do the things everyone does and you’ll probably get to something that’s . . . well, . . . not broken. But if you want to be successful and outstanding. Doing what everyone does won’t get you there . . . because to be outstanding, by necessity, you have to be individual.

To do stand and shine as uniquely valuable, a business or an individual needs a road that leads in a singular direction.

Note that I used the word leads.

A Plan to Be Irresistibly, Outstandingly Successful

Any effective, efficient project, business, or life has structure and direction. It starts with a destination — literal or figurative — and then a route to get there. Without a plan, we leave ourselves open to winds that push us toward distractions or detours. A plan, well thought and well provided for is the only way to get where we want to that shining end point.

Have a plan and work the plan is sage advice.

Why It Takes a Personal Plan to Be Outstandingly Successful

Last week we talked about making decisions. Here are the reasons that outstanding success demands a plan.

  1. If we don’t have a plan, we’re just wishing.
  2. If we don’t have a plan, we’re always here and success is always out there.
  3. Without a plan, we have no direction. Any road will take us anywhere, but we won’t end up there.
  4. Without a plan, every decision is likely to have as much power as a whim.
  5. A plan is the only way to benchmark our progress and to build on what we’ve accomplished.
  6. A plan is keeps us focused when other ideas tempt us away from our dreams.

Decide. Plan. Get determined. The plan makes a dream into an outstandingly success. It’s the plan — the decisions and determination — that fuels the reality. Distractions are easier to disregard when we can hold them up to a plan we know we can achieve.

Without a plan, we’re always getting ready to succeed. Christine Kane says it eloquently.

“How will you go the long, long journey,
if you’re always about to begin?” — Christine Kane, Falling in Love with the Wind

If you want to be outstandingly successful, plan for it. Outstanding is a stake in the ground that we keep our eyes on. It’s a path that we plot for the life that we want. It’s as easy as a decision.

Have you planned outstanding success into your life?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need help deciding? Work with Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

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