Successful Blog

Choosing and Deciding: How Do You Sort a Path to Opportunity?

by 5 Comments

Knowing the Right Path

insideout logo

It’s the end of what’s been not the best year. The economy is still uncertain. History tells us that it’s times like these that great leaders and great business are born. Inside and outside of traditional business, people are finding their path to opportunity, showing up with their skills, and claiming their reward.

Survey the landscape and three groups stand out.

  • People who are following a path to opportunity set out by someone else.
  • People who are forging their own path to opportunity.
  • People who can’t seem to find a path to be on.

Which group describes what you’re doing?
What are the first two groups doing that the third group is not?

Choosing and Deciding: The Key to Sorting a Path to Opportunity

Every change, every cycle, every downturn and upturn in the economy offers opportunity. The question is how do you find the best opportunity for you, your business, and your team? No matter the economy, we see old and new companies succeeding — How did SAS in Cary, NC get to be #1 on CNN’s 100 Best Companies list? How does Zappos keep growing their happiness business? … and individuals who are doing the same thing. — How did Susan Gregg turn her closet into a $50 Million business? How did Michael Mothner turn a tough interview question into a $12-13 Million business?

How did those folks find success how did they figure out where they’re going and stay true to that?

Obviously every business and individual who’s enjoying success has sorted and found their unique path to opportunity.
Key to that success — leveraging opportunity — is understanding the difference between choosing and a deciding and know when do each. What kind of choosing and deciding sorts the world of possibilities so that we can get on to that same sort of success?

When the Possibilities Are Endless You Need to Choose

Naturally the first step is defining and describing our unique version of success. If the possibilities seem endless, then you need to start with choosing.

Choosing allows us to try alternatives. The origins of the word choose are in French and German words that literally mean to taste or to test. A choice is what happens when we survey a box of chocolates knowing that whichever we take now, we’ll return later to take another one. The choice is a selection that resembles a bungie cord – make a choice, enjoy it, and bounce back to make another version of that choice again. We can choose more than one, even if we’re choosing one at a time.

If you’re choosing, do this.

  • Start broad.
  • Look to your past successes. What common threads do you find in all of them?
  • Identify 5 -7 categories, skills, problems you’ve been solving, or topics to focus your quest.
  • Take time to experiment. Mix and match a few ideas that have worked for you in the past.
  • Try out the possibilities to see what fits.
  • Talk to people who know you about the results.
  • Use each test to narrow your options.

As you keep trying on the options, you’ll begin to see what fits your values and your skills (or that of your team/business). Use the choosing to focus in on a clear vision of where you want to go or what you want to do. Brainstorming, ideation, conceiving new products and new initiatives all start with choosing from the wealth of possibilities available to you.

When It’s Time to Move Forward, Decide

Open options work great when we’re testing and trying, but when it comes time to be building and buying too many options paralyze. Moving forward requires commitment to one option, one direction or it will be too easy to get pulled aside.

Deciding allows us to determine a path. Decide literally means to kill off all other options. Deciding is what happens when we face the junction of many roads, knowing that whichever we take we’re moving on a path that means undoing to go back to that juncture again. We can commit to only one decision, but that commitment determines our direction, sets our destination, and fuels our ability to stay on course.

If you’re deciding, do this. Ask and answer 3 questions.

  1. Can you see the destination? Every time you succeeded you could see the finish when you started — the college degree, the thriving business, the trip across country. Define and describe where you are going or you will never get there.
  2. Is your head in it? Have you the skills, the DNA, and the ability to learn what you need to know to do this? The perfect opportunity is at the crossroads of your skills and the challenges that you enjoy most. Boredom comes when things are too easy. Anxiety sets in when things are too hard. Failure is certain when we choose challenges we weren’t built to meet. I’m 6 ft tall, so despite my grace and my 14 years of dance training, I’m never going to be a ballerina. But in my own way, I’ve become an information choreographer.
  3. Is your heart in it? Will you love the going there enough to keep it fun even when it’s not? Your heart has to be the keeper of the vision, the holder of the commitment that you make to yourself and the decision. We call that integrity. Can you trust your heart to be bigger than the fear that is sure to show up?

Knowing when to choose and when to decide is critical to sorting a clear path to your true north. Choose to sort out your best options then decide on which path will be your own.

Do you use choosing and deciding to your best advantage?

Knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.
Who would follow you if you don’t?

Be irresistible.

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

The Five Questions to Leverage Your Unique Position

by Leave a Comment

Start with Knowing Where You Are

insideout logo

Strategy is a about making and leveraging new beginnings from wherever you sitting right now. The very nature of strategy is unique to who or what you are. In other words, it’s not a plan that is go grand it good apply to anyone.

Statements like these that I’ve read on too many corporate strategic powerpoints are not strategies …

  • Become a thought leader in our space.
  • Raise our brand awareness.
  • Leverage our customers to own more market share.

These are broadly written descriptions of possible goals.

A strategy is a practical system to advance achievement. True strategy focused on leveraging opportunity consistently and fluently in the direction of growth.
Strategy is uniquely formed from knowing where we stand and what we own.

Strategy begins by understanding where you stand and bringing all of who and what you are to where you want to go.

Knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive. Who’d want to follow you if you don’t know where you’re going to go?

So, to get get from here to there, you need to have a goal — a vision on the horizon that you’re willing to commit your best resources to achieving. You’ll need a team of great people to support you — belief and influence will attract the best people to participate in your mission to reach that vision.

But first, you have to know where you are before you go.

Getting from here to there is impossible if you don’t know where here is.

Your unique position defines how to leverage strategic opportunities that yours alone.

The Five Questions to Leverage Your Unique Position

To build a true strategy a person or business has to begin with where you stand and a clear picture of where you want to go. It’s hard to get there from here, if you haven’t figured out where here is. These five questions will help define your unique strategic position.

  1. What drives you to your mission and your goal? Know why you do what you do. No person, no business accomplishes great things alone. Frodo had his friends. Batman did too. Your mission clarifies your position and the field on which you’re playing. It’s the higher calling that attracts the right team who want to move things forward with you.
  2. What do you already own? The strategic of owning nothing can mean the lower risk of nothing to lose. Do you have a spark, a spirit, a culture, a process, a system, a model, a location, a concept, a team that works for you?
  3. What position on the playing field do you uniquely hold by why of the ground, the talents and the values that are your own? If your back is against the wall, no one can sneak up behind you. Distract, Divide, Decide the rules that work for you. Choose the most natural rule of opposites put it to work for you. If the industry cares about sales, care about follow through. If the industry cares about flash and glitz go minimalist. Make having your back against the wall the new the black — the envied position to choose.
  4. What is your role that serves others better than anyone else can? Be driven to make nothing about you. Nothing beats listening to the people who love you to help them with their dearest quest. Use your position to get to know who loves you and to raise the best of them closer to their goals.
  5. How will you combine these to decide how every competitve offer is irrelevant? What does your team bring that no other team can offer — that no other team could reproduce? What’s the WOW of just interacting with you?

Being good at execution or at picking a direction won’t get us to that winning goal. Understanding the strategic advantages of every position, even the worst one you might imagine, that allow us to make the small adjustments and leverage the advantages that the folks who need the “sure winner,” who can’t risk, can’t see, or can’t move fast enough to leverage. Knowing and constantly reassessing your position is as important as knowing your goal.

Have you found the leverage in your position yet?

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

What Narrow Niche Already Loves What You Do?

by Leave a Comment

cooltext443809602_strategy

Recently at SOBCon NW, I had a familiar conversation with someone trying to start a business of her own. We talked about her skills, her past successes, and the people she liked working with with. I asked her what she was thinking about building about business around. She told me her concept.

It was huge.

The territory she was trying to cover was way too wide for a first step. Because the content base was so huge the audience would include almost every person from 21 to 65 near the idea of business, social media, or tech in any place in the world.

It’s no wonder she didn’t feel qualified to be an expert. Who would?
No one can be an expert of everything for everyone in the world.

I asked her one question … Who already loves what you do?

What Narrow Niche Already Loves What You Do?

Ever tried to read all of Wikipedia? It’s hard to keep all of that knowledge connected and meaningful without a reality to hang it on. Ever tried to learn a new vocabulary word a day? If the words don’t relate to each other, they fade away as fast as they came. Put a narrow context around a vocabulary you want to learn or an idea you want to explore and suddenly you’re making traction.

It’s the narrow context that allows us to see relationships and apply what we know to the next new thing we learn.
Here’s a few ways that narrowing your niche can build your expertise:

  • When we choose a narrow niche, we can go deeply vertical. We get to know one certain group of people very well. We know who we’re talking to. We know which words are their vocabulary, which metaphors are theirs, which ideas get them to move.
  • When we choose a narrow niche, we “get” the world of that customer group. We can predict the ways they make decisions. We can imagine what they worry about. We decide what features and benefits serve them well and what will be just so much more noise to what they’re trying to do without.
  • When we choose a narrow niche, we can closely study the specific problems of that singular customer group. We get to know what frustrates them, what they yearn for, wish for, and which they never saw again. We have special insight into their view.

      • And as a result of narrowing our niche, they quickly recognize that we “get” them, that we’ve built a product or service that was made for them, and they become our fans. Then convince their friends to become our fans too.

      And narrowing your niche can build your business as well because …

  • When we choose a narrow niche, it’s easy for others to see who we serve. People look who we work with and the commonalities show. All of Mike’s clients are families with small children. All of Britta’s clients are tech CEOs. Marti specializes in launch stage startups.
  • When we choose a narrow niche, people within that niche tell each other about us. Soon enough folks outside the niche ask if we can do it for them too.
  • When we choose a narrow niche, it’s easy for people to share what we do with their friends. When we we’re one thing, they think of us when they meet anyone who has that need. We’re shareable.

It’s true that you can’t be expert at everything for everyone. But who’d want to?
Make a decision to be irresistible to one specific group. Then we can move out slowly to the group that stands right next to them.

Who already loves what you do? Be an expert to them first.

Who is that group for you?

Be irresistible

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

5 Focus Strategies to Seize the Right Opportunity Right Now!

by Leave a Comment

The Signal to Noise Issue Isn’t Only On the Internet

cooltext443809602_strategy

Has it happened to you that you’ve invested your best strategy into landing a chance — an introduction, a project, small job for a potential client. Now is your moment! You can move forward your mission, change your position, take advantage of the changing conditions this chance affords you to leverage your expertise into new rewards and new experiences.

Even on a small scale a new opportunity ripe with potential can set off a world of thinking that undoes our ability to get down to what needs doing. We find ourselves over researching, procrastinating, contemplating the future, and social networking to see what others have done who have had the same experience.

The signal to noise ratio ratio on the Internet may be a distracting influence, but nothing undermines our ability to seize the opportunity right in front of us more than the signal to noise ratio that we allow in our heads.

What We Do That Undoes Us

In faster than you can fragment a computer, we fragment our heads and convince our hearts that they’re not a part of what we’re doing. We get busy with thoughts past and future and irrelevant arguments about what we could, should, or might be doing. Does any of this sound the least bit familiar? We fill our heads with

  • how we’re the wrong person to do this.
  • how we’re much better suited to be doing what we’re always doing. .
  • how people won’t respond well to what we end up doing.
  • how while we do this we might be missing other exciting opportunities.
  • how our results have backfired or fallen flat in the past.

    • And the big one …

  • how boring, uninteresting, long, hard, difficult, not fun, time-consuming and beyond our abilities we’ll find this new opportunity — among the 23,067 other reasons we might have for not doing it.

All of which are centered in the past or the future, not the current reality.

5 Focus Strategies to Seize the Right Opportunity Right in Front of You Now!

How do you know that you’ve got the right opportunity? A well-chosen opportunity is a match of our skills with enough challenge that we’re the perfect halfway between anxiety and boredom. We’ll need to stretch just a little bit, learn a few things as we’re doing it, but that will keep our concentration.

If you’ve chosen the right opportunity, the key is to focus and to stay completely in the moment. NOW is the only moment and the opportunity is the only the focus. Here’s how to do that successfully.

  1. Focus in on seeing the project finished. As Tim Sanders says and my experience agrees with, when our brains know that we plan to succeed, our subconscious releases the chemicals we need to help us do that. Call it flow or in the zone, but it’s the optimal experience. In order to get there, we have first have to know exactly what the task is. Every task you successfully finished had as many roadblocks and snags as those you left by the ditches. The difference in your successes was that you knew, you had decided you would finished and that became your first point of focus.
  2. Focus on the process and resources you need to do it well. In your mind plan through the process and see yourself doing it. Break that process into stages and determine what resources you need to complete each piece of the process. Bring the resources you need to where you will need them. Get serious about dedicating a true workspace to the project.
  3. Focus on making that opportunity a priority.Decide how much time you will dedicate to moving it forward every day and allow yourself no excuses. Include time for rests, rewards, breaks, and some play away from it — but don’t let the play be more important than the opportunity you’re ready to seize right now.
  4. Focus on working in the moment. Keep every step of completing the process in the NOW. Don’t relate to past successes, except to move this process forward. Don’t think about future rewards until it’s over. Don’t let other things interrupt you.
  5. Focus on how any opportunity can be the vehicle you need to learn what you should be learning. Love the faults and flaws of the project. Challenge yourself to value everything that you wouldn’t normally like doing. Find the fun in the most mundane tasks and huge overwhelming challenges. Turn every bit of the opportunity into a smaller, exciting opportunity of its own.

If you can master those five strategies, the payoff for you will be huge and long lasting. You’ll find that your life is more in control because it’s more focused, less hurried. The things you’ll be doing will be more efficient because you’ll be choosing to focus on doing only one of them at a time, which means it will get your concentration and best thinking.

Listening will be easier and you’ll be more likely to know what to ask and what to listen for.. Fewer communication problems will be happening. You’ll find yourself easier to work with and other people will agree with that assessment. Your confidence will rise.

Work will be more enjoyable and you may find that you like doing more kinds of work than you ever thought you would. Proof of concept is that what I’ve written here is exactly what I did when I didn’t want to write this blog post. And I had a blast doing it.

It’s really just a matter of turning down the signal to noise ratio in your mind. Are you ready to seize the opportunity right in front of you now?

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

Be Irresistible: Find the Unique Opportunity that Is Yours in Any Moment

by Leave a Comment

Ack, What Do I Do Now?!

cooltext443809602_strategy

Let’s just say it was in the last few years …
My life already had become all about working with corporations and individuals on simplifying their strategic goals. Daily I asked people questions. Sometimes the situation was about an immediate problem. Sometimes it was about far-ranging visions and goals. The questions were the same, the answers were sometimes easier to find than other times..

Five types of questions can get anyone to the best view of the opportunities in any moment:

  • Mission – Know where you are going. What is your specific and ultimate goal? Can you see it. What is your commitment to it?
  • Position – Know the unique place where are you alone are now. What is unique about where you stand in the situation? What do you uniquely bring to the table? How can your perceived weakness be turned into a strength? (if your back is against the wall, no one can come up behind you.)
  • Conditions – Know how change offers you unique opportunities. What has changed that offers an opening, an opportunity, that uniquely suits you?
  • Command Decisions – Know how to focus and sort which decisions move you toward your ultimate goal. Which opportunity moves you toward your ultimate goal? How does your response work toward making more opportunities? Which decisions will build a foundation for stronger opportunities tomorrow?
  • Networks and Systems – Know who will help you execute and how you will keep your process going. Who can help? How can you align your goals with another to make the movement faster, easier, and more meaningful for both of you? Where is the process so strong it’s invisible or so weak that it stand out?

Strategy is a framework for claiming the opportunities that uniquely our own to move forward toward a specific goal in realistic ways over time. Keeping an eye toward our end game — our mission — is only the beginning. If we recognize the unique opportunities inside every change — when we move, when circumstances move, when the people around us move — we can see a clearer way to that ultimate, specific goal.

Have you analyzed your unique opportunities lately?

Be Irresistible

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

How Will You Find Opportunities Today?

by Leave a Comment

Motivate Yourself to See Beyond the Situation?

We can be so task oriented that we miss the opportunity in the person that we’re meeting. Every person represents all of the people that person has ever met or might introduce us to.

That person might be an interviewer or a taxi driver or a server in a restaurant. When you say hello don’t just think about the person think about the opportunity.

If we make a connection with a person, even if that person has nothing that might align with our goals … he or she might represent a connection to someone or something who does.

People are the opportunities

How will you find opportunities today?

I dare you to claim a way in the comment box. 🙂

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