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Run Your Direct Sales Business Like A Professional

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Professionalism is an attitude not a time commitment.

Whether you are a hobbyist, a part time consultant or a distributor making a career out of direct sales a professional attitude is the path to success.

Treat your business like a profession and you will achieve professional results.

Run Your Direct Sales Business Like A Professional

Professional AttitudeThe professional sales consultant and team leader must stay focused on the positive to maintain a growing business. Team growth, sales and professionalism all hinge on the leader’s attitude.

Over 60,000 decisions are made each day. So, simply do your best and avoid self-judgment and regret. Make sure that you always choose the path of positive growth and the power of a positive attitude will be yours.

Do not get hung up on the small stuff! The secret to being content, happy and successful in sales is to make every day be a positive one and to choose your friends and attitude carefully.

People Love Doing Business With Positive People!

When you live your life with a positive focus you will attract people to you.

The single most important thing to the success of your business is your attitude.

I have found that the best philosophy for life is to do the best I can one day at a time. Don’t regret the past nor shut the door on it.

Live today with gratitude and be the best you can be each day. Don’t focus on what you do not have. Keep in mind that your best can change from minute to minute and your best can always be better when you grow because of your daily experiences.

Remember that everyone is living life the best that they can too.

When you keep that in mind, and understand that everyone is operating from their own space, then you never have to take things personally.

Nothing that other people do is because of you.

What other people say and do is a projection of themselves only.

Professionalism is an attitude not a time commitment.

All successful businesses are based on systems. When the leader has a positive professional attitude it will carry over to the sales team.

Author’s Bio: is a direct sales educator who teaches proven systems that work in all direct sales companies. Treat your business like a profession and you will get professional results. Learn more home business systems at: http://www.CreateACashFlowShow.com

Whole health series for business owners: reading The Difference Maker, by John C. Maxwell

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By Teresa Morrow

In his book, The Difference Maker, John C. Maxwell offers tips and tools for not only living differently but questioning our attitude toward life.

He challenges the reader to discover a new way to define ourselves in this world. He shares that “much of what we do every day comes from habitual behaviors. Over the course of time, we have developed a way of approaching life”. This book is described as “one-on-one coaching” from one of the nation’s top leadership experts, John C. Maxwell.
 
Here are just a few segments in the book that struck me (there are many):
 

Your Attitude is Your Responsibility

Maxwell is talking about taking responsibility for your attitude. He shares a story from the singer Roberta Flack and how her parents didn’t make it far in school. She continues to say that despite this, each of them was literate, spoke well, and their values were high. She says, “they drummed into our heads that the situation you live in doesn’t have to live in you.”

Teresa’s Tip: Don’t allow what happened to you in your past define who you are today. Those things in our past can be like a weight dragging us down; however, we have a CHOICE to let go of the weight.

Negative Breeds Negative and Positive Fuels Positive

Maxwell offers a simple but poignant idea. Negative thoughts leads to negative action. He says, “…negative thoughts lead to negative beliefs. Those beliefs become the basis of wrong decisions, which lead to wrong actions.” He goes on to state that it can be a vicious cycle. However, we can break the cycle by forming better thoughts and positive habits.

Teresa’s Tip: This is the basis of law of attraction– what you put out, you get back to you. It doesn’t mean you will never have a bad thought or not do something wrong. However, this can help you understand that you can change your thoughts and not allow them to linger on. You can turn around a bad thought or belief and make it a positive one.

Change; it’s a Part of Life

Maxwell shares tons of great information in this section on change. He offers this quote from Andy Warhol, “they always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol
 
Maxwell adds five reasons people resist change: 1) People resist change because of personal loss 2) people resist change because of fear of the unknown 3) people resist change because the timing could be wrong 4) people resist change because is feels awkward 5) people resist change because of tradition.

Teresa’s Tip: He’s right about change—we don’t enjoy it. But what if we (and I include myself in here) don’t fear it but embrace it more. Let’s try and see change as an adventure to new possibilities. I’ve embraced change in my life (when I met the love of my life) and it was a great experience (we have been married for 10 years!) But I’ve also been resistant to change (recently my mom passed away and it is hard to live without her physically in my life). But one thing is true about change—it is going to be a part of our life whether we like it or not. It’s better to find a way to work with it instead of pushing against it.

Failure is an Opportunity

Near the end of the book, Maxwell shares his thoughts on failure. He offers this, “most people don’t need to learn more about how to overcome their rivals. They need to learn how to get out of their own way.”
 
He goes on to talk about how to profit from failure. He talks about an earlier book he wrote, titled, Failing Forward. The focus of that book was “that the difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”
 

Teresa’s Tip: Hey, it’s going to happen–you and I are going to not succeed at something. But I like the last line of the above statement….”their perception of and response to failure.” Again you and I have a CHOICE in how we deal with what happens to us…including when we fail. We can have our time to react initially—be angry, be sad, be disappointed; however, we don’t have to dwell in the failure but use it to fuel us for the next stage of what is going on in our life.

 
In this book, The Difference Maker, the author John C. Maxwell challenges us with the question, “Is attitude everything or nothing?” What do you say?
 
To get your copy of The Difference Maker by John C Maxwell go to Amazon The Difference Maker: Making Your Attitude Your Greatest Asset (Affiliate link)
 

Author’s Bio: Teresa Morrow is an inspirational author, blogger, poet, and author of ‘Life Lessons from the Heart’ and ‘Healing from Broken Trust: A Journey of Transformation.’ Visit her website at http://TeresaMorrow.com.

Entrepreneurial Tips – How to Maintain a Positive Attitude

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By Ronald Alexander

As entrepreneurs, we put work just above everything else. Unfortunately, sometimes when we are working toward something, we forget to maintain a positive attitude, which can lead to additional stress and an unhappy all-around life.

The 10 tips listed below will help you to stay positive while at the same time driving your business in the right direction.
How to maintain a positive attitude

1. Work with people that you like

It’s easy to be unhappy in a business where you are surrounded by negative people all day. This is why it is vital that you hire and work with people who have a positive attitude and don’t drain you emotionally.

2. Don’t hesitate to fire people

It is 100% okay to let people go who are not doing all they can do to help your business. Usually a primary cause of stress for entrepreneurs in the workplace is having people who make them unhappy because they either don’t work hard enough or constantly stress out about little things. It’s a great release when you know that you have just made your work environment better for everyone by letting someone go.

3. Create long-term goals

Short-term goals are good, but having goals that extend decades will allow you to be more focused on where you want your business to go. These goals are usually far less stressful and will show your team that you do know what you want out of your company.

4. Feed your creative mind

Every entrepreneur is creative, so it’s natural that we need to fill our off-time with things that will feed that creativity. Some people like to read, while others get their creative juices flowing by taking a long walk. Whatever you need to stay charged up, you need to make sure that it is included in your weekly schedule.

5. Continue to be yourself

People often forget what got them to the point of being an entrepreneur and having a business. The fact is that you need to continue to be yourself even as you are taking off as an entrepreneur. The people who work for you and the business contacts that you make need to know who the real “you” is. You don’t have to develop a phoney business persona, which, I promise you, will lead to additional stress.

6. Don’t be a yes man

Many people have the instinct that saying yes to their employees will keep all parties happy, but in reality a business has to be run by someone who knows when to say no. If someone needs help with something and you have an important task that you are dealing with right now, you have to tell them no and they’ll need to find another solution to their problem. Always take a second to assess everything before you answer questions at work so you can be honest with yourself and others.

7. Remember to take a break once in a while

Entrepreneurs are usually workaholics, but everyone needs a break to stay fresh. The truth is that those breaks that you take every day will allow you to get better work done, which should be reason enough to take them.

8. Expect stressful situations and deal with them the right way

Work is stressful no matter what you do for a living, so it is each person’s responsibility to deal with every bit of stress that is thrown in their direction. It’s tougher earlier on because you are new to all of the business scenarios that you will face, but with time you will learn how to deal with the stress. Just go into every situation knowing that there will be stress and then conquer it.

9. Don’t expect flawless work

It would be nice if everything we do in our work life ends up being absolutely perfect, but that’s just not reality. You want to draw things up to be perfectly played out, but the most important thing is that you reach the end goal in everything you do. Don’t focus too much on the imperfections; this can help you put off some burden.

10. Don’t try to do everything on your own.

You have a team for a reason, so you have to learn how to delegate responsibilities. It’s not easy at first, but you shouldn’t try to do too much of the work on your own. You run the business, so figuring out who should be doing what all day will help you to take a lot off your plate.

To sum up: You need to figure out what’s keeping you from being as happy as you can be in your business life. Going over these tips should help you to figure out how to lessen the stress so you can focus on getting your business to where you want it to be.

Author’s Bio: Ronald Alexander is a passionate writer and avid blogger currently associated with Forsyth.co.uk, which provides business services including flexible office space and virtual office services in Manchester.

Image source: Pixabay by Nemo

Can You Change a Difficult Co-Worker’s Attitude?

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We have all been there at one time or another in the working world.

You are thrust into a situation where you have to work with someone who either has a negative attitude towards their job, towards their employer, towards you or all three. So, what can you do to better the situation?

The worst case scenario is leaving the job due to the actions of a single person. Remember, you got the job for a reason and it is your career, not the other individual’s future, which is at stake here.

What Are the Issues with a Co-Worker?

In dealing with a difficult co-worker, take some time to run these items through your head:

  • Is the individual causing problems for you specifically or other staff too that is impacting your ability to do your job?
  • Has the co-worker been warned by management about their behavior before?
  • Have you had one-on-one discussions with the co-worker about their actions and how they are impacting you and others in the office?
  • What is the biggest thing you would like to change about a problem co-worker?

In cases where a difficult co-worker’s actions are directly impacting you and your ability to successfully do your job, it is important that you not just let things go. Remember, your professional success is on the line here, so don’t let someone else take you down with them.

Having worked for 22 years now in different fields, I’ve worked with some fantastic people, some okay people and some real jerks for lack of a better term.

In one situation, I had only been on the job at a company for a few months when a co-worker, who later was promoted to the head of the department I was in, became an issue.

As fate would have it, this individual loved to micromanage people, always point out the bad instead of the good in a person’s work, and always seemed to just want to make your eight hours a day on the job as unpleasant as possible.

After a few weeks of dealing with this situation, I went to the owner of the company to discuss the matter, even offering to resign. He stopped short of accepting my resignation and asked that I give him a few days to investigate the matter. After doing just that, my supervisor became a former employee of the company.

As it turns out, other individuals also had expressed concerns about working with this person, pointing out that they too sensed she was not only not good material for a supervisory position, but that she was creating an environment for an ineffective department.

Standing Up for Yourself on the Job

What I learned from this situation was that not only is everyone replaceable, but that you have to stand up for yourself not only outside the office, but inside too.

Even when I have worked over the years with people I didn’t necessarily like, I respected the fact that we were all brought together to do a job for our employer. I told myself that I did not have to be friends with these people outside the office, just do enough to make for a productive work environment.

Do I think bad co-workers can be changed?

Honestly, it depends on the environment you’re working in, what type of setting management has in place, and whether or not trying to change the individual is worth your time.

Most importantly, stand your ground at work if you’re dealing with a bad co-worker. While not putting your own job in jeopardy, work with management if necessary and keep them in the loop of any incidents that involve you and a bad co-worker.

In the event the difficult co-worker is the company’s owner, you might want to start polishing up that resume.

I can say I’ve been lucky to work under some good owners over time, something that you definitely should not take for granted.

As for all the co-workers I’ve had in four jobs over 22 years, do you have a few hours?

So, how have you handled dealing with problem co-workers?

Photo credit: blogs.villagevoice.com

Dave Thomas, who covers among other subjects’ corporate credit cards and business phone service, writes extensively for business.com an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.