Successful Blog

How to learn from your mistakes

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Rosemary O’Neill

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What? You’re not perfect? Nah, me neither. But here’s a little secret: it’s what you do after a problem, crisis, or failure that really counts.

As an entrepreneur or small business owner, every day offers new opportunities to learn, grow, and strengthen your enterprise. When you take the time to document your learning experiences, you’re getting leverage for the future. I’m the child of an Army officer, so I refer to these as “after-action reports.”

Once you’ve weathered the storm, and the dust settles just a bit (not too much), do the following:

Bring together all of the players
It’s essential to get together in an atmosphere where there’s no blame assigned. It should be in the spirit of doing things better next time.

Figure out whet led up to the crisis and whether it could have been avoided
Was there a broken process that led to the problem? Perhaps you’ll decide that the problem could not have been avoided, and focus on how to respond next time.

Assign someone to document and make recommendations for change
Ask someone on the team to write a summary, and suggest ways it could be done better next time. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, this would be an ideal time to tap into your mastermind resources or your mentor. It’s possible they have already been through a similar situation.

Share the recommendations
Be sure to share the recommended changes with everyone on the team. Sometimes retraining or new training is necessary. Reinforce the training with some roleplaying if it’s helpful.

How do you formalize your “lessons learned?”

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
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Use the Psychology of Focus to Get More Done

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Beware the Illusion of Multitasking

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Have you ever had one of those days when you felt like you achieved a lot of things, but when you thought about it before a good night’s sleep, you found you’ve actually achieved nothing?

That is the illusion of multitasking.

Or as Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University once said, “Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident of their abilities, but there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

And he’s not alone with his opinion. Various psychological studies have since found that multitasking comes with a host of side-effect, which includes everything from dampened creativity to lower IQ, and ironically, decreased productivity.

In fact, studies have shown that your brain can really only handle one task at a time, and even though it only takes one-tenths of a second to switch from one task to another, these “little” delays can add up and account for as much as 40% of a person’s productive time. And that’s not even including the 15 minutes it takes, on average, for people to get back “in the flow”.

So you want to multiply your productivity and grow your business? The answer is simple: focus.

Optimizing Your Work Space

Most people think focus is an issue of “willpower”. That if you just “try to focus more”, the problem would go away. I believe the inability to focus are really two problems: a lack of willpower and an abundance of negative triggers.

Before I go on, let’s get one thing straight: willpower is a limited resource. It’s not a motivational issue. It’s a capability issue. Studies have shown that if you spend your willpower resisting a piece of cookie, for example, you’ll spend less time trying to solve a complex puzzle later.

Willpower can grow, just like a muscle can get stronger, but there’s always a limit. It is a resource that should be managed like time and money. When we run out of willpower, we need to take a break. And because focus takes willpower, I believe multitasking, therefore, is a form of “mental break”.

So my approach to focus is twofold: increase willpower and conserving it. The first approach — willpower — is not only widely discussed, it’s also a painful process. I won’t go through it in this article.

The cleverer approach is to cut down on the distractions that drain your willpower. And one of the biggest drains of willpower are triggers. What are triggers?

According to BJ Fogg, founder of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, three things must converge at the same time for a particular behaviour to take place: motivation, ability and trigger.

So according to Fogg, if you want to stop multitasking, you can try to change your motivation (difficult, in my experience) or you can hamper your ability (eg: hire a supervisor to stand over your shoulder). None of which are ideal, of course.

The last, and in my opinion, the easiest way to avoid multitasking is to simply get rid of triggers. Triggers are reminders for you to multitask. They are like temptations.

So for example, if you’re working on this report and Outlook pops up saying you have a new email… guess what you’ll do? That’s right, you’ll immediately check out the email. The same is true with any other alerts and notices.

Other common triggers include:

  1. Advertisements. Have you ever surfed the web for research but clicked through an ad and as a result, abandoned what you were doing? Enough said.
  2. The people around you. I used to work from home and one of the biggest triggers for multitasking at the time was my wife – once in a while she would ask me to check her email, or come into the room with a plate of food (it was a loving gesture, but that doesn’t make it OK!)

In your case, the trigger maybe the colleague who keeps dropping by, asking if “you have a minute”. Or perhaps it’s your boss always looking over your shoulder.

Mental Drains

Other than triggers, here are two more common mental-drains:

  1. Noise. Try this: Close your eyes and just listen. Can you hear your computer buzzing? How about the air conditioner humming? Maybe it’s traffic speeding by?

    These background noises have been shown to lower willpower and discipline, even if the subjects didn’t perceive stress from them. And as we now know, as your willpower drains, you begin to multitask.

  2. This one is the least talked-about mental-drain: functional control of your working environment. Functional control means you have to be able to adjust anything you want in your working space, things like the temperature, where you sit, what’s on your desk, brightness, etc.

    Functional control not only gives you physical comfort, it also give you psychological comfort. The fact that you can control the space gives you a sense of territoriality and safe space. It’s the difference between working in a strange environment and a place you’re familiar with.

    Now some entrepreneurs I know of are perfectly comfortable working in a cafe, but most of us just couldn’t handle the lack of functional control. The fact that there are strangers around you all the time puts most of us on edge.

So there, 4 easy ways to conserve your willpower and focus more. Do you have any tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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Author’s Bio:
Andrianes Pinantoan is part of the team behind Open Colleges, an accredited business management courses provider. You can follow him @andreispsyched.

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

Influencing Decisions – Part 2: 4 Things to Let Someone Know Before You Ask

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IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Not Everyone Has the Context You Do

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A few days ago I got another phone call from a person I met several months ago. He said his name and then said,
I’m launching a new product and I’m wondering if you’d like to see a demo.

“What?” was all that I could think of to say.

When he’d called, I’d been knee deep in writing a proposal. I was well into the context of the strategy I was developing and that strategy had no connection to the name or the random question that had just interrupted it.

After an uncomfortable few minutes of asking questions of my own, I managed to find out who the person was and why he was calling me — he wanted to enlist my help. After all, we were connected.

The disconnect in this “connected” thinking is that I can’t help everyone with whom I have a conversation, much as I might be inclined to be the helpful one. My life, my family, my friends, and my landlord demand their own part and parcel of my time. So I can’t stop my own goals to pursue others’ quests just because they ask.

No one can.

It’s hard enough for any one of us to determine where to lend our support to the most noble of quests within the time we have in our lives.

If you’ve got a quest that needs support, help yourself and the people you might ask by being able to tell us the information we might need to make that decision before you ask.

4 Things to Tell Before You Ask

  1. Lead with relationship and context. Let me know who you are. Your ask or offer will get turned down if it’s bigger than the trust in the relationship. Set the context for your conversation by establishing what that relationship is and why that trust exists. How do I know you? Why are you an expert at what you’re about share?
  2. Be clear on what you have. Let me know what your quest is. Tell me what exactly you’re talking about. be able to say it in 25 words or less. If you still need paragraphs of detail, you don’t know what it is.
  3. Connect your me to your quest. Let me know why you’re asking ME and not every turnip that that falls off the truck. Tell me why you’re asking me — why you believe my expertise will be a valued contribution to your success. That will pique my interest in your quest. If you’re asking everyone, you haven’t considered what any one person might offer and that anyone can do what you ask.
  4. Make helping easy, fast, and meaningful. Let me know how little I have to do to help. the facts. Don’t tell me about your disappointments. Think of what I might expect the product to be and then make sure I know if something in that definition is missing.

Anyone with more than one friend has to find a way to decide which friends to help and when. When you move beyond close connections, it sure helps if the “friends” asking lets us know that they’ve thought enough about their quest to start with trust.

Asking isn’t easy. Saying “no,” isn’t either. But time is the only resource no one has enough of.

Take the time to understand and prepare for the four points above and you’ll save time because you’ll contacting the right people with the information that they need to answer faster with a yes.

How do you make sure you’re ready to ask?

Be irresistible.

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

What if Your Salespeople Stop Selling?

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Meet Larry Bailin

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Larry Bailin to talk shop. Larry is a talented internet marketer and a nationally sought keynote. Larry’s in his second edition of his book, “Mommy, Where Do Customers From” and enjoys continued success at his firm Single Throw located in Wall New Jersey.

The two of us sat across from one another and covered all the requisite mainstays like what portion of your mix should comprise PPC, how much of your social footprint should be automated (Larry says none and incidentally, I think he’s right) and the two of us agreed that Seth Godin is a keeper. But the typical talking points of our conversation, while enlightening and entertaining in general, didn’t move the needle.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s fun to talk to other internet marketers – particularly those that the industry leans on as much as it does Larry. But no. The conversation was cool, but the majority of the time largely academic. The majority that is. You see, something fascinating DID happen. Something was unearthed. A fortuitously excavated idea emerged from an otherwise casually enjoyable dialogue between two passionate internet marketers.

The Fortuitous Idea

So what was so gripping about our talk? What topic emerged that did, in this marketer’s opinion, move the proverbial needle?

It was this: salesmanship. Specifically, how to disarm buyers when engaging them.

Nothing special right? I mean who among us doesn’t understand that disarming buyers is critical to earning a customer’s confidence? None that I know. But Larry helped me stumble upon a model for appealing to buyers that, for me, called upon marketers and product makers to sell as much, if not more, than is expected of the sales team.

It’s an uphill climb … Salespeople are gods of optimism. Salespeople have a tough job. We all know it.

Selling well takes a scientific understanding of the human condition. Being great at it requires all that, plus the grace of a ballerina, the poise of a Super Bowl quarterback, and the precision of a brain surgeon. This is why selling is often perceived as Herculean. Just ask any seasoned seller. They’ll tell yah: sales is not a vocation for the weak. And it’s because the nuance and complexities of the sales dance, that establishes trust with buyers is a salesperson’s toughest obstacle — they face built-in quantities of both skepticism and doubt.

To their credit, the ever-hopeful salespeople press on, despite a century of data that tells them every day that 95 percent of their effort, or better, is a waste of time.

Wow. Nearly 100%? Just wow!

It’s Time Salespeople Get a Hand

What if your salespeople weren’t the only ones selling? What if she wasn’t the only one attending the all those breakfast briefings, tradeshows and mixers? Not so novel you’re thinking, right?

Scott, our salespeople do travel to these events with product specialists and marketers.

I know, I know. But let’s dig a bit deeper into the potential role that supporting cast could play in securing that sale for our valiant sales peeps. We’re bringing them, but are they helping?

Ok so, what if – just what if – the salesperson wasn’t the salesperson?

What if the product makers were also marketers … what if marketers were also salespeople? What if every person on the team was all three?

I told Larry that I never seem to come off appearing like the salesman toward buyers, although I’m always selling my stuff.

Says Larry, “It’s because you’re not the salesman, Scott. Someone else is the salesman. You’re just Scott. A nice guy with great ideas.”

And the church choir erupted in sonic ecstasy! And birds softly propped on slate roofs everywhere, all at once, scattered in a flurry into the dewy fog of an early May sunrise! And there it was.

“But Larry, my brother, I am selling!”

I am the salesman, the marketer and the product expert all at once. And I should be all these things if I want to help my sales folks make the sale. And because I am not actually the salesman after all, I get to say, “Hey buyer, I’m not the salesperson.” When I bring the salesperson to meet the buyer, I get to say, “This is Jane. Jane handles sales. I’m Scott. I just help.”

This tag-team method of prospect engagement builds relationships in these ways.

  • It disarms the buyer.
  • It tells the buyer that they’re not dealing with a pushy, pressure-fraught situation.
  • It likewise tells buyers they’re dealing with a person who helps with problems and isn’t driven by thinly veiled sales agendas.

It’s been my experience that the buyer ultimately ends up saying to me,” Hi Scott. What’s your story?” And the sales process has begun.

So before your sales team gears up for the next event, get your product people, your marketing people, and your salespeople in the same room to talk about how to evolve your sales process.

How might your team captivate buyers with a disarming and helpful approach?

Kudos Larry. Great talk.

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Author’s Bio:
Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and internet marketer. Scott’s blog, ( scottpdailey.com ) makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

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

Influencing Decisions Part 1: 4 Things to Know Before You Propose an Idea

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IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Be Prepared to Influence the Results

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The CEO was a great thinker. He made his decisions on the facts. As I watched him in meetings as people presented ideas with their best efforts to win him over, I learned a lot about what influences the decision making process.

One of the most important things I learned was what I should know to hedge my bets.

Influence is built on trustworthiness and connection.
To achieve those and meet our goals, it’s important to finely focus on the roads that will take us to our goal and the ways of inviting people to join us that move their mission forward as well.

4 Things to Know to Move Forward Before the Abyss of Next Steps

Whether we work for a huge corporation or sit at a desk in our living room, we can’t be successful without tapping into the influence of others who can help us make our ideas and our projects become real. Yet, we all also know the experience of leaving a meeting or ending a phone only to find that the decision we wanted fell off the table into an abyss called “Next Steps.”

Knowing a few things before we go into those meetings can influence the results significantly by building foundational trust in our competence and connecting our goals to how those we want to help will benefit.

    1. Know your short term purpose. Who are you and what are you building? Too often, we enter a meeting, write a blog post or email, or walk into a meeting without a specific and thoughtful goal in mind. Why are you there? Are you trying to rally support for a new idea? Do you want to change a plan in progress? Are you exploring ways to work together? Are you after funding to research the idea? Will you share something new you’ve discovered? What do you want to be true when the conversation ends?

    2. Know how this project will make the answer you want clear. Know how you’re going to make the project happen. Ask yourself before you meet, “What would be next if the answer is yes.?” Sketch out a plan of action and reasonable estimates for the costs and the resources needed to execute that plan. Do the thinking so that they don’t have to. Present a simple plan that can stand on its own.

    3. Know how your plan will bring relevant and positive results faster and easier. Establish context that makes your goal relevant to the audience you want to enlist. Why are you pursuing this goal and why would the audience want to align their goals with yours? Are you informing a large audience or a small one? How deeply do they need to know the details? ?How will you connect what you want to happen to what already is? How will the proposed project fit into what they’re already doing? How can you make your proposal mission critical to THEIR goals?

    4. Know how your experience will add value and mitigate risk. How will you establish your knowledge base as an expert? If possible, tie the proposed idea or project to something you’ve succeed at in the past. If you can’t, know what you’d expect based on your experience and be able to explain why you’re confident that together you can make this innovative approach a success. Research similar ventures. Be prepared to speak to one or two you know well.

Ideas are fun, but they’re not the genius that builds an economy. For no matter how ideas — genius or not — that get set on the “business table,” it’s the ones founded on solid thinking, realistic plans, and influential support from the right sources that develop into the next awesome technology or killer app we own.

If we do the strategic thinking and develop credible plans before we propose the idea, attracting the influential support of the right people is faster, easier, and more meaningful. In fact it could be said to be irresistible.

Be irresistible.

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

DO it Scared

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by Patty Azzarello

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Recently, I keep finding reasons to think about being scared. Or more specifically, getting reminded that being scared is OK.

Successful people spend as much (or more) time being scared as they do feeling confident and comfortable.

The difference is that they do it anyway.

My worst moment…

Here is the story of what might be the worst moment in my career.

I was in my early 20’s and I was a sales engineer. My job was to demonstrate technical products during the sales process.

It was my first week on the job after being trained on one of the two products in our product line. The sales force was not supposed to schedule demos for me for the second (more sophisticated and specialized…”scarier”) product until I had a chance to get the training. So much for “supposed to”…

I found myself in a room of customers who demanded that I do a demo of the product I didn’t know. I told them that I could show them the product, but I wasn’t prepared to do a full demo. So I launched the product and they started firing questions at me. I must have said, “I don’t know, I’ll have to find out and get back to you” at least 30 times. It was humiliating.

Talk about uncomfortable. I don’t think I knew the answer to a single one of their questions. I didn’t even understand the questions. It was painful. I was used to being seen as smart and competent and prepared. I was SO embarrassed. Then it came…

One of the customers said to the sales person in a frustrated, angry tone. ” Why did you bring HER? She doesn’t know anything!”

You know what happened?

I didn’t die.

Yes, it was very painful, and beyond uncomfortable, but it didn’t kill me.
What it did do, was give me a list of 30 important questions customers have about this product.

The next day I sat down with the product manager and asked him to explain to me what those 30 questions meant, and how to demonstrate them in the product.

Within a week I was the second most competent (and in demand) sales engineer to demonstrate that product. By contrast, there were other sales engineers at the company who stayed scared to demo that product, so they never even tried. Their careers did not advance.

Scared is OK

That one experience allowed me to be scared for the rest of my career, but to also know it’s OK. I was genuinely scared every time I got a promotion. I was scared many times in big presentations, meetings or negotiations.

That man’s voice was in my head saying, why did you bring HER. She doesn’t know anything.

But that lesson allowed me to realize:

1. That you can be scared, screw up, even fail, and you will survive.
2. That failure-learning cycle is far more valuable than the safe, not-doing-it approach, where you learn and accomplish nothing.
3. Over time it get’s easier. If you force yourself to act when you are scared, every time it gets easier to act when you are scared.

In brief — do it scared.

Scared and Successful

Ultimately, I was able to be scared, and still perform really well most of the time. My way of working would be to push forward, be scared, and do it anyway.

I still cringe sometimes. I am not perfect. I forget things, and get thrown off sometimes. But now when that happens I always think about what I learn from the minor embarrassment and feedback. It makes me better next time, and forever after. I would not improve without some amount of trial and failure.

If you never put yourself out there, you never get the feedback, practice, insight, and ideas to tune what you are doing to be more successful. You just stay stuck.

And it’s also important to realize that if you mess up a few times in dozens or hundreds of outings, it has no impact whatsoever on peoples’ impression of you. Those moments just fade away as you replace them with the improved, excellent ones.

Fear and Competence

People who are not held back by fear have broken the link between fear and competence.

What I mean by this is that some people when they feel scared, have a tendency to think that is a sign that they are not worthy. They think…

If I am scared and I feel vulnerable, that must mean by definition that I am not good enough to be in this situation.

This is not how successful people think. Successful people break the link and say something instead like…

I feel scared and vulnerable, so it’s going to be harder than I expected to put myself out there. Damn, I guess I have to do it anyway.

It breaks my heart when I see gifted people hold themselves back because they are too nervous to step forward.

One woman in particular I am thinking of did some breakthrough medical research, but was not comfortable being the one to present it. Guess what happened.
The presenter claimed the credit and she got pushed aside. What should have been a breakthrough moment in her career turned into a setback.

The invisible risk

Staying in the background because it is more comfortable, does nothing. It adds no value, you don’t learn, and you fade into the background. In terms of being vulnerable, in reality you are much more vulnerable if you are invisible, than if you are out there.

Being out there and being imperfect, trying to move things forward, and committing to contribute is actually a much less risky way to behave in your career.

Leaders Step Forward

It’s not about being flashy or having a big personality. Leaders drive outcomes and then they communicate about them. Even the most humble, introspective, introverted leaders put themselves out there when they need to. And it is very powerful.

The power comes from showing that you are taking ownership for the outcome of the communication, not from the song and dance. Leaders step forward and show others that they care.

I saw a TED talk by Dr. Brene Brown about Vulnerability and Shame. I’ve included a link below, it’s really worth watching, but I wanted to point out a couple of things that really struck me on this topic of fear and success.

1. Everyone feels vulnerabilty and shame

Everyone. Not just some people. Not just most people. Everyone. If you are human you feel shame (unless you are a psychopath).
So there you have it. Vulnerable or Pshcyopath.

I found that very comforting. To think because I feel scared, I am not good enough, makes no sense – because everyone is in the same boat. Another reason to do it anyway.

2. There is no Creativity or Innovation without fear

There is no success without failure. Great ideas and big successes come from people who are willing try, fail, and keep going. Good ideas stem from bad ideas. Failure is necessary to progress.

Do it scared, and you might get someplace.

The words she uses, which I really like are “Daring Greatly”.

Here is the link to Dr. Brene Brown’s talk “Listening to Shame”.

Her research and her talk are about much more than these two points. It’s worth the time…

What about you?

When have you been scared or failed, built success out of it. Please leave your story in the comment box below.

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advisor. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

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