Successful Blog

What “Julie and Julia” Taught Me About Reaching Goals

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By Terez Howard

During a recent night of Netflix searching, my husband and I watched the movie Julie and Julia. This film, from 2009, intertwined the story of cooking sensation Julia Child with Julie Powell, a blogger who challenged herself to cook every recipe in Julia’s first book and record her experiences in a blog. This true life adventure helped me realize a key to reaching goals.

One pivotal scene is the movie is when Julie decisively commits to this cooking/blogging challenge. She announces her decision to her husband, Eric, and says that if she does not give herself a deadline, she will not complete that immense task. One year for 524 recipes.

Give yourself a deadline

When I worked for the newspaper, deadline was a word I heard daily. “Will it be ready by deadline?” “We have to meet deadline.” “Maybe we can extend the deadline a little for this breaking news.” “It’s too late; it’s after deadline.” The deadline dictated what would make the daily news.

With a blog, it’s hardly a necessity to make your content stick to a strict 10:30 a.m. deadline. However, there are benefits to establishing a blogging schedule.

A deadline means more than just the time your posts appear for public viewing. A deadline gives your goal or goals a point of fruition.

Let me illustrate it this way. Let’s say that I want to start integrating video into my blog. I would give myself a week to research and purchase a video recording device and another week to shoot two to four videos. I would allot myself two to three hours per day per video to make my own edits. Then I would spend a day posting the videos and another week to fiercely promote them.

Know this, I’ve not yet put video on my blog. But this rough sketch gives me the idea that it would take me a good month to get a few decent video posts published. My time allocations fit my schedule. They might seem drastically long to you or perhaps not long enough. However, only I know what I can handle.

The same goes for you. You know what you are capable of achieving and how long it will take you.

Light a fire

Do you need to light a fire under yourself? Make your deadlines tighter and stick to them.Give yourself one week to get high quality video on your blog.

At the same time, be realistic.If you work a full-time 40-hour week, such a task might be insurmountable in such a short period.Give yourself necessary leeway, not excuses.

And please, don’t decide to do something by the end of 2011. That’s too general. If you’re going to be that general, make several short-term goals and deadlines along the way.

A new year, a new deadline

Most people look at the start of the new year as a fresh start. Challenge yourself by setting a deadline to just one goal. It could be for your blog, for your weight, for your family, or something else. Whatever it is, treat it like you were a reporter at a newspaper. It is urgent. With no deadline, there will be no news.

Tell me, what is your goal? What is your deadline, and how will you achieve it?

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Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. She has written informative pieces for newspapers, online magazines and blogs, both big and small. She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas . You’ll find her on Twitter @thewriteblogger.

Thanks, Terez!

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

Influence: How to Persuade Anyone In Business to Do What You Want

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

10-Point Plan: Train Self-Managing Teams with an Outstanding Bias Toward Quality

Communication Through Persuasion

The best executive team I was ever a part of was 8 people who knew their jobs — none of us were experts in the jobs of the others but the team worked highly efficiently with sincere commitment and we followed a principle we called the “Persuade Me” form of leadership. It looked something like this …

I may not know anything about the new phone system you want to introduce into the building, but I’m an intelligent, thinking person, who knows how to make a good decision. So, persuade me that this is the right one.

No matter the question, the problem, or the innovation that was put before us. We sat ready to listen to the reasoning that would move us to understand why we should champion its cause.

How to Get Anyone In Business to Do Whatever You Want

Whether we’re a consultant, a freelancers, an entry level employee a C-Suite executive, the work we do has to move something forward for us it to benefit us and our customers. Sometimes that means getting the people who work alongside us and the people who sign our paychecks to take our advice as to what needs to be done.

If you want to get people do what you want, it’s matter of persuasion. Whether you’re looking to move a huge organization or get someone to sponsor a small event or project you’re planning, persuasion is the key to positive action. Persuasion is a strategy that requires these steps.

  • Know your audience. It’s hard to persuade someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. Understand what moves them and what worries them. Get inside their needs, wants, and desires.
  • Ask about their short-term goals and restate what you’re hearing as you listen. As people tell you what they’re trying to accomplish, clarify your understanding by restating what they’re saying in your own words. So if I’m hearing you right that means you want to … Define scenarios that might achieve what they’re shooting to make happen.
  • Ask about possible obstacles to their goals. Let them keep talking until you fully understand what they’re facing and truly want to help them get where they want to go. Learn about their process and how decisions are made. Find out who needs to be “sold” for a new idea to be adopted.
  • Suggest that you might help them by aligning their goals with your own. Offer your idea, project, or plan in the context of how it will benefit them. Point to the goal and the possible obstacles they’ve mentioned, then show how your suggestion will remove the obstacles and move them toward their goal.
  • Explain how your plan, project, or idea works for them. Focus on the benefits not what you love, but what makes sense to their situation. Champion those benefits with all of the passion that drew you to idea or project from the start.
  • Ask how you might make the two work together even better. Suggest that they discuss how well the idea might work over time with their coworkers, how it might need to be changed, and whether it needs outside input. Allow them to add or remove content or pieces. Do we need to make it smaller or larger to get the right kind of attention? Do we need to bring anyone else to keep things going?
  • Build a strategy on how to introduce them to the larger group. Discuss how easily you and they might be able to persuade peers and paycheck signers to participate. Step back and let them own the process while you talk. Should we offer training? a meeting? Shall we propose a proof of concept to demonstrate and measure the validity and success?

Those who best navigate a business culture are those who know that persuasion works better than confrontation. It’s important to stand for your values and to champion your expertise, but the presentation can be softer than an all on debate.

People like to be in on the thinking and to know that what we’re proposing benefits everyone, not just the person proposing it. So whether it’s a ReTweet, a budget cut, a new product idea, or a complete renovation of the operation, it works best if we reach out knowing that the folks we’re speaking to are

“intelligent, thinking people, who may not know anything about the intricacies of what we’re proposing, but who knows how to make a good decision.” So the job is to persuade them with facts, logic, and humanity that what we’re doing is something they want to be doing too.

How do you persuade your clients, customers, bosses, employees, vendors, and volunteers that what you what is worth doing?

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Influence is the Most Critical Signal When a FAIL Noise Is Sounding

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(Updated in 2020)

10-Point Plan: Show Influential Leadership in Times of Trouble

Influence Is a Clear Signal Above the Negative Noise

I submit that every person or business with any shred of visibility has had this experience.

You make an offer or offer an opinion that’s meant to establish trust or build a bridge of good intentions. Someone takes it out of context and soon you’re branded as something that is the opposite of who you are, what you stand for, and what you do.

Really what could have prompted us to do something as thoughtless as to put the wheelchair sign next to the stone stairway and think that meant accessibility?

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People start repeating the wrong thing — not what you said or what you did, but some interpretation that sounds more interesting and negative. The tribe is speaking and they’re speaking negative about you. What do you do? Remember that you still have influence.

  • Realize that you’re still you. Capture your values in three words that are smart, heartfelt, and about other people.
  • Immediately move to remedy damage with leadership. Leadership is not a false apology. Leadership can be saying “thank you,” to a detractor. Leadership is what restores balance that moved.
  • Stand on your reputation and start talking too. Tell your story and your history in terms of those values with clarity and conviction.
  • Focus on the truth and compassion for those who misstate or misunderstand it.
  • Keep repeating your commitment to values and leadership.

What person or business has escaped the experience of being misunderstood? The person would have to be a hermit and the business, well, it couldn’t be doing much business.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that it’s not about pleasing folks who don’t like us, but about truly thrilling and serving the folks who love every bit of us. They are the ones who bet on us when the going gets rough.

Before the Internet we called the people who watched out for us our support system, now we call them our personal or professional network. Whatever we call that group that surrounds us with the benefit of understanding, the reciprocity of keeping them nourished with our attention and fed with our gratitude can be as simple as remembering them.

The best thing we can do for our brand and our businesses is to protect and care for the people who protect and care for us … even when we’re not seeing them do it.

The most critical signal is the respect and gratitude we constantly and consistently celebrate for the people who share our values. It resonate still whenever any negative noise sounds.

What do you consider most critical when a negative noise is sounding around you?

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

Thanks to Week 271 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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cash-and-joy
design-mom
kinetics
makeuseof
socmed-sean

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

7 Outstanding Web Tools to Organize 2011 and Get the Right Information to You

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A Guest Post by Lior Levin

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The Internet has put more information at our fingertips than ever before, and, at the same time, given us more to remember. As great as the digital age has been, it’s also been a nightmare for organization, giving us more mental clutter than we ever thought possible.

Fortunately, developers are finding new ways to use the Web to help people stay organized. In every area from finance to news, new Web-based tools are cropping up to help you stay organized and avoid information overload.

Though they target different challenges, their goals are are all the same: Filter out the information that one doesn’t need and ensure that the info you do need is available and easily accessible.

That is something all these tools do very well.

Contacts: Gist

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Being on the Web means that we have an ever-increasing contact list and those contacts have an also-increasing number of means of contact. Between email, Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and more, it can be hard to keep track of who we know, where they are and what they are up to.

Gist, however, makes it easy, by syncing up with your various accounts, it unifies your contact list into one easily-digested list that is sorted by importance and includes all means of contact.

Finances: Mint

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As great as online banking is, most of us have multiple accounts and our finances spread across more and more companies. Fortunately, Mint makes it easy to view all of these accounts in one place, by accessing your various banking, loans and credit accounts and then displaying the information in one place, making it easier than ever to get a clear picture of your finances.

Best of all, since Gist automatically categorizes your purchases, you can easily see where your money is going and where you can save money.

Files: Dropbox

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If you use more than one computer, the frustration of having to more files from one machine to another are well-known. Though flash drives and email can help, they are clunky and slow solutions. Fortunately, Dropbox can help.

Dropbox automatically synchronizes files between computers, without you having to do anything. It just runs in the background and when a file is changed on one computer, the other machines on the account get the update almost instantly. Also great for collaboration and backup.

Social Networks: Tweetdeck (Chrome App)

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If you are like most people, you have at least a few different social networking profiles spread across several different sites. Keeping track of them all can be a huge pain. Fortunately, Tweetdeck’s new Chrome Application, which is a Web-based HTML5 app, lets you follow your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare accounts and more all from one multi-column pane.

Best of all, with merged columns you can get all of your private communications (IE: Twitter DMs and Facebook messages) in one stream, regardless of where they came from.

Documents: Google Docs

Though Google Docs is best known as a tool for editing and creating files on the Web, through features like easy sharing, folders and document upload, it is also a way to organize and access your critical files anywhere you need them.

While it isn’t ideal for all document types, most simple documents can be easily used with Google Docs, making it a natural way to keep your files handy, no matter where you are.

Incoming Links: Zite

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Between our Twitter streams, RSS feeds and other sites we follow, many of us have far more links in our inbox than we could ever read. Zite, which is currently in closed beta, calls itself “Your Personal Web Filter” and it goes through all of that to find the stories most important and most interesting for you.

Most interesting of all, Zite learns from your behavior and is always honing its approach to what you find interesting, making it a tool that gets better the more you use it.

Task List: Producteev

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Busy people have a lot of deadlines but keeping track of those deadlines can be a real pain. Though calendars can help, especially with meetings and appointments, there are many tasks that just aren’t right for calendars like laundry or sending out birthday cards.

Producteev helps organize those tasks and, through integration with email, IM and an iPhone app, makes it easy to ad tasks and receive updates on them. is also great for managers who need to assign tasks and deadlines to a team as it has a built-in function for group management as well.

In the end, the Web has both done more to make our lives more cluttered and more to simplify it than any innovation before. We have more information being thrown at us than we ever thought possible and more ways to sort, organize and parse it than we did just a few years ago.

When it’s all said and done, the Web is just a tool and we’ll get out of it exactly what we put into it. If we let it drive us to insanity, it can do so. But if we make it a tool to organize and streamline our lives, it can do that just as easily.

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This outstanding review was written by Lior Levin who is a consultant to iAdvize, a live chat support software company. You can find Lior on Twitter as Liors

Thank you, Lior. You’re welcome back here anytime.

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

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