PLEASE Design your Freedom with me!

OK… It’s confession time!

I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom, independence, and liberty lately. I recorded all the John Adams mini-series episodes and watched them in one swoop two weeks ago.

It was really great to learn about the challenges those early founders of the United States grappled with as they did the persistent work of getting this country organized, and launched as it’s own nation.

One of the most interesting parts of the information, at least for me, was the reminder that while those people held a common purpose, they didn’t all share the same values, goals and priorities. And so they had a lot of frustrations as their attention was pulled in many competing directions.

Just like you and me in our businesses.

I mentioned last time that the folks who tell me what they want are the ones who influence what I do in this weekly newsletter. As I continuously work to keep The Spark fresh and relevant for you, I look at the feedback you each send me.

So I’ve made it completely easy for you to let me know:

1 - What are the specific challenges you are now facing in your business?

2 - What are the specific results you wish you could create?

PLEASE, take 19 seconds, right now, to send me an email at Linda@Feinholz.com and tell me so that I can get you the High Payoff results you want.

I look forward to shaping articles, tips and programs to get you further, faster and easier! This time next year let’s be celebrating your own Independence Day

Here’s to Your Success!

July 12, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized, Vision | Leave a Comment 

Change 1 COMMITMENT And You Can Change It All!

It’s not at all unusual to become stalled…. as an unconscious reaction to mis-aligned goals and projects.

If it’s been a while since you reviewed your Vision, and the action plans you’ve been following, you may have begun pursuing projects that feel like ’shoulds’ rather than ones that have a direct, high payoff for achieving your Vision.

And if you’re keeping yourself over-worked and over-whelmed, you’re not building in time to notice that you’re putting energy into activities taking you further and further off-course.

So take a look at the most recent Vision and Objectives you set. And take a look at what you’ve got scheduled on your calendar. Ask yourself:

“What percentage of the activities I’m focusing on actually align with my Objectives?”

Make a 2-columned list - place the activities that are on track on the left and the ones that are off-track on the right.

Now create an action plan to wrap up the activities in the right-hand column in the next 10 business days. When you commit your attention fully to the actions that are aligned with your Vision, your results will be achieved much more rapidly than you ever anticipated!

Let me know the results you create!

June 24, 2008 | Filed Under Managing, Vision | Leave a Comment 

BE A BEACON, NOT A CHAMELEON IN YOUR BUSINESS

© 2008 Linda Feinholz

In meetings with friends and clients this past month I asked a few people to be part of my R&D team to find out what stopped them from getting out there in a BIG way to get clients.

I also asked them to tell me the goals they set themselves being self-employed. Honestly, I was startled by the answers that rolled in, and their answers were right in line with what I hear from many other people I’ve talked to about this.

You see, most people have very LOW expectations and their actions match it. They decided that it was a fair exchange to liberate themselves from the constrictions of employment to gain full control over their work and their income. And they even capped their earnings expectations.

Using SYSTEMS and LEVERAGE techniques in marketing and managing your business, you can totally change that to create an income that is FAR beyond what you’ve assumed. I know it for a fact as I’ve helped my clients achieve it.

However, leverage and systems aren’t enough. Why do I say that? Because if you do the math, you need to target $300,000 a year in revenue to pay yourself and the people and services you’ll use to do marketing or service delivery, or administrative tasks, and so on.

The biggest stumbling block to reaching that next level is ‘habit’. The habit of thinking and acting like a generalist, serving anyone and everyone. I did it myself for years. It’s a commonly held belief that the wider we spread our net, the larger our likely result. I myself held that belief for years, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Being a generalist means you’re constantly working on multiple ways of introducing who you are and what you do in the hope that it resonates with the person you’re talking to. All your attention is on adapting like a chameleon rather than shining like a beacon that calls people to you.

Get out of the way of your OWN High Payoff using these three Key Activities and you’ll see your results soar:

Key 1 – Select a Target Market and Stick To It

Your services may be equally productive to a wide range of clients and customers. However, when you pick a niche, a class of clients who share particular characteristics, you make yourself more memorable. The truth is, you increase your identity as an expert.

Elsa Lucan, a landscaping specialist in Los Angeles, recently made the shift from taking a wide range of projects, large and small, to working with homeowners who want to create completely new outdoor spaces. She focuses on using little known planting techniques that result in astounding growth and exquisite spaces.

A second shift she’s made? No longer doing the hardscape herself. Elsa now designs and supervises its installation by specialists in their own right. Her time is planned farther out, her crew knows they’re booked, and she’s seeing a doubling in her revenues in the space of a year.

That’s what people want – specialists solving their challenges.

Key 2 – Differentiate From Others Providing Similar Services

We often think of differentiation as being about our technical resume, dress and manners. Ironically, the personal story behind our choices attracts our market to us like a magnet.

One of my clients recently realized that when she spoke of her emotional reason for providing services to parents of young children – facing the same challenges she’s come through herself – her rate of closing doubled… and in half the time.

Her clients feel she ‘knows’ them and their challenges.

Key 3 – Take 5 Paths to Connect With Your Market

It’s easy to settle into habits unconsciously. Marketing by networking is one example. It may not actually get you in front of your ideal clients. When you expand your marketing activities that let your potential client know you’re the specialist to solve their issues you create momentum and business growth. Four additional activities that deliberately sharpen your identity include sending a newsletter to your contacts, writing articles, forming joint ventures with others who provide complimentary services to the same market, and asking clients for referrals.

Ironically, I’ve been implementing Keys 2 and 3 systematically for months. Yet I was neglecting Key 1. For 15 years I’ve worked with financial advisors, more than half my clients every year … yet I never said so. It’s time for me to declare my niche and use the three Keys together for myself.

How about you? What is one shift you could make to be a beacon to your ideal client and grow your business further, faster and easier?

March 19, 2008 | Filed Under Marketing, Vision | Leave a Comment 

Change 1 Insight And You Can Change It All!

I truly believe that living from our Gifts creates the best world we can have.

When we recognize that unique aspect of ourselves and use it on purpose, the work we do becomes play, the conflicts we run into become interesting challenges, and the people we work with become teammates in creating a vivid, exciting world.

Someone you work with is unaware of their Gift. Yet you see it. You see it and your blessing in their life is to tell them so this week.

Take a sheet of paper and ask yourself:

“Who do I know that does something with such ease…

and they’re unaware that it’s a gift?”

List all the people who come to mind, and what it is that they do so easily. Remember, what you acknowledge in them enables them to offer it in greater abundance.

Now drop them a quick not and tell them of the Gift they’re bringing to your world, whether at work or outside it, and how much it’s appreciated.

December 24, 2007 | Filed Under Goal Setting, Ideas, Inspiration, Vision | Leave a Comment 

HOW TO MAKE 2008 THE YEAR OF YOUR IDEAL LIFE

By Linda Feinholz, “Your High Payoff Catalyst”

I truly believe that each of us can create and live our ideal life.

Our Ideal Life is the life that meets our Core desires, and provides an outlet for our Gift - our innate skills and intuition. It’s the life that allows us to recognize our unique gift and use it - to purposefully choose work that lets us live our deepest self. It’s the life that inspires those around us to do the same with theirs.

Can you describe what yours looks like? Would you say you’re living it now?

All too often we have a clearer sense of our Core Desires when we’re children, yet loose track of them as the world around us bombards us with messages full of “should” and “have to” and “can’t”.

We have hints of our Gift, using it unconsciously and tune it out, waving it out of sight because it’s so easy for us to use. It doesn’t look anything like the effortful activities we’ve been told any valuable effort must be.

Imagine the life you’d create if you founded it on having every one of your Core Desires, and using that effortless Gift. Wouldn’t that be a fabulous life? I think so!

You don’t have to walk away from the life you’ve built to live that Ideal Life. My client Shannon felt out of sorts most of the time – dealing with complex international business logistical issues and fractious personalities from three different generations. She’d risen in her career based on opportunities that presented themselves and she was ready to walk from it all.

When we uncovered her Core Desires to be a peacemaker and to nurture people early in their career, she deliberately shifted her focus from managing the logistics of an international business, to solving strategic partnership challenges for the company and mentoring new members of the team.

The High Payoff results were that Shannon loved her work, the company saw turnover drop 30 percent in the first year among junior staff, and management was able to retain all the knowledge and experience Shannon had built in her career.

As for me, my Core desires are for health, continuous life long learning, and companions to share the journey. I’ve built a life that brings me each of those, and that let’s me use my gift for cutting through chaos and confusion to get to the core issues and find practical, easy, High Payoff solutions to them.

So, tell me, are you living your Ideal Life now? Or, have you spent a lifetime being sent off down other paths?

Fear, opinions of others, self-doubt have gotten in the way of your living your ideal life with ease. They’re no longer reasons for suppressing who you are. Think of them merely as the creative entertainment provided by the society you live in.

If you have fear or doubts about living from your Core, tell yourself “Fear is no longer an excuse.”

You have a purpose in being here and your only responsibility is to bring your gifts to the world to enrich it and create a vibrant life for yourself and for others.

If you’re ready to bring you Core Desires and your Gift into focus, here’s a technique I use with my coaching clients and MasterMind members. It will take you less than 1 hour and can unveil the stepping stones to your Ideal Life.

  • Take 2 pieces of paper and something to write with. Divide each piece of paper with a line down the middle, top to bottom.
  • On the first page, label the left-hand column “What I loved at that job…” and the right hand column “… because it let me…”
  • On the second page, label the left-hand column “What I hated at that job…” and the right hand column “… because it prevented me…”
  • Starting with your first ‘job’ fill in all 4 columns. Do all four columns for each job you can remember right up to today. If you need the space, carry your notes over to additional pages. Even if the answers seem similar from one job to the next, write it all down.
  • When you’re done writing, read your answers out loud and listen to the pattern that will reveal itself in the answers you’ve recorded.

Even better - take this exercise into a group of others who know you well, to do it as a group. Pair off and have one person prompt the second person with the phrases over and over and act as the scribe of what is said out loud for them. Then reverse who is talking and who is scribing.

Then, as each person reads their own responses out loud, as partners you can listen and suggest patterns you’re hearing. The listeners will ll also be able to suggest what they’ve experienced as the other person’s Gift – “the thing you do with such ease that is so uniquely you.”

Engage your Core, your Gift, your entire self and watch what you can create in this life, through your work, our relationships, your play.

I so want to live in the world you’ll help create for all of us.

December 22, 2007 | Filed Under Goal Setting, Ideas, Inspiration, Vision | Leave a Comment 

Change 1 Goal And You Can Change It All!

There is no single perfect formula for a High Payoff life. At different points of our life we each need to rebalance what we are giving our time, attention and energy to. One of the quickest ways to check where you’d like to shift your attention can be done using a “Life Wheel”.

You can create one right now on a blank piece of paper. Draw a large circle. Turn it into a pie by drawing 10 equal slices. Put each of these words in one of the slices: Health. Family. Friends. Finances. Career. Learning. Recreation. Community. Giving. Spiritual.
With your attention on one topic at a time, ask yourself:

“How satisfied am I with this aspect of my life?”

Beginning at the center of the pie, shade each slice to the degree that you are satisfied with it. This will give you a graphical reference of where you’d like to set a new goal. Share that goal with others in your live and you’ll have a whole new balance in no time!

November 27, 2007 | Filed Under Goal Setting, Vision | Leave a Comment 

THE 10-PERCENT KEY TO CREATING A HIGH PAYOFF LIFE

By Linda Feinholz, “Your High Payoff Catalyst”

It’s not at all unusual for my coaching club members to feel their life is a bit out of balance. Taking the time to get back in touch with their goals can completely re-orient how they use their time and efforts, and the success they create.

Working with new clients this week got me to thinking: why not give a “coach’s challenge” to my newsletter readers to get back in touch with their own Goals. This challenge can help you focus your personal and professional time for a month, a year, and beyond.

If you’ll set aside 10 minutes today to read through this list of 10 areas in life, and set a goal for yourself to increase your attention and energy by 10 percent in any or all of them, it will lead you on the golden road to a High Payoff Life!

Ready to get started? Here are 10 Key Areas that help you create that High Payoff path.
1. Health. What attention do you give to creating health in your life? Do you have an image of what you’d like your health to be? Setting aside all the exercise fads and diet programs, do you choose ‘health’ when you select your food? Do you move your body beyond the floors of your home or office? Do you spend even eight hours a week breathing air that hasn’t been re-circulated?
2. Family. Do you have your soul fed by ‘family’ time? For some of us that means parents and children, brothers and sisters and cousins. For others it’s the family we create with the people we share our lives with. How much of your life contains life’s celebrations and comfort with family?
3. Friends. How much time do you spend with others who share your interests? Do you actually have interests beyond your profession, your job, your career? The creativity and solutions we find in our work life are often found in through rest of our lives. The richer we make our relationships, the richer our ability to revitalize the rest of our life.
4. Finances. Do you look money straight in the eye? So many of us are taught to avoid looking at our finances as if it’s the luck of the draw what we earn, what we keep, how we use money. The clearer you set your money goals, the easier it is to lay out the systematic steps that will give you the power over money in your life..
5. Career. Were you aware you make most of your life a career? You spend your weekday daylight hours out in the world on a professional path. You may do it as an employee or employer. Whether you make your mark as an entrepreneur or professional, or as a business owner the goals you set are the goals you achieve
6. Learning. Do you gift yourself with life long learning? Learning comes in those moments when you ‘stretch’ yourself beyond the familiar. Learning may come to you through conversations with others, sports activities, books, magazines or even deliberately listening to talk show hosts you don’t agree with!
7. Recreation. How do you play? I mean do you ever let loose in ways that let exuberant energy flood you and burst out in laughter? At times it may be physical play through sports, or mental play through attending concerts, lectures, theater. Hike, bike, dance, picnic, rent a horse or paint a house.
8. Community. Do you have a connection with the people living around you? More than saying “Hi!” to the checker at the grocery store, have you let yourself become part of the web of connections at your local schools, library, or recreation center. The more people you connect with, the more avenues you create for yourself to build relationships in all the other areas of your life.
9. Giving. When do you turn your attention from acquiring for yourself to helping those in need? Donating your time, attention, energy and intelligence is often as valuable as your funds. Your community is filled with organizations designed to offer assistance. You can join as a board participant, an advisor, or even as an event volunteer. Every one of those activities can be gifts that reshape the world.
10. Spiritual. Do you feed your spirit? For some of us it’s found though joining people in organized religious participation. For others it’s in quiet moments in nature. There is even the opportunity for connection within our daily routine through meditation, singing, and other pursuits.

Set a goal to add just 10 percent more in any of these areas. Share this list with others in your life and create the shared goals that will build a rich life for years to come.

November 25, 2007 | Filed Under Goal Setting, Ideas, Inspiration, Vision | Leave a Comment 

7 STEPS TO HIGH PAYOFF FAILURE

By Linda Feinholz, “Your High Payoff Catalyst”

It’s not only at Halloween that we show up in costume rather than our authentic selves. From a very early age we’ve been trained to hang on to the masks we wear. We got messages to put a smile on our face, don’t cry, say ‘please,’ ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ when we don’t mean it.

So we put on labels like ‘professional’, ‘boss’ and ‘successful’ and then construct a mask we think presents that to the world. And as business owners and entrepreneurs, those masks don’t serve us well in the long run.

We loose track of who we are what we really want for ourselves as we posture our successes whether or not we feel we’ve achieved them.
We miss learning how to cope with disappointments and take action to build on unexpected results of our efforts.
We miss out on new relationships and information that could rapidly shift us from failure to success.

We miss learning how to “Fail Up.”

So here are 7 tips for creating High Payoff Failure and using it to accelerate your Success!

1 – Set Your Vision
In order to experience Success you have to know what it looks like. No one else can set your Vision for you. That means taking the time to create a rich Vision of what you want, in a project, in business, in life. So set aside 10 minutes, grab a piece of paper and something to write with and in 15 sentences describe the success you want 20 years from now.

2 – Unleash It
You’ve written it down. Now announce it. Stand in a comfortable place and read it out loud. Then let it go. Get your attention on the actions you’ll take to do your part to achieve it. Even 1-hour a day will do. Make that hour fully focused on developing your skills, your idea, and moving your plan forward and by the end of a year you’ll have mastered a new skill, moved your idea into the real world, and put hundreds of hours into making it come true.

3 – Consider Each Failure Market Research
The best-kept secret of Success is that it’s built on Failures – lots of them! The faster you fail, the quicker you are finding out what ideas, plans and actions you should spend less time on. The quicker you recognize what won’t get you to your Vision, the faster you can adjust your efforts to focus them on what will succeed.

4 – Compete For Failure
If your attention is on ‘what others are doing’ or ‘someone else has done it’ as an excuse for waiting to take action – you’ve missed the point. They’re failing and picking themselves up and continuing on toward success. They’re laying the groundwork for your own path on their budget instead or yours. Watch them so you can leverage their hours of effort and dollars spent by learning from their failures so your energy can be spent on different failures on the path to success.

5 – Ease Your Way Forward
People who became ‘overnight successes’ will tell you – They spent hundreds of hours a year for many years creating that success. And they often did it while holding down another job. If your Vision is in a new path, dedicate relaxed, decisive time to it. Put uninterrupted time on your calendar daily and weekly to focus on it and you’ll be able to announce your own instant success as well.

6 – Success Calls For Celebration ~ And So Does Failure!
Make sure you don’t get so buried in the tasks that are building each step from failure to success that you don’t appreciate the learning along the way. Each of those ‘Lessons Learned’ hold valuable information and deserve to be recognized promptly so that you and everyone else on your team recognizes their value. Then you’ll all climb back into action with the attitude that says “Bring it on!” and keeps you headed towards Success.

7 – Surprise Yourself
Remember how you unleashed your Vision? One of the most important reasons is so that you don’t micro-manage it. Failure will make you pause and step back. When you shift your attention, you’ll be able to see that the universe is constantly providing you with encounters that lead to your Vision – often in unexpected opportunities and new people crossing your path. Keep your attention out in the world where those amazing encounters can offer you new ideas and even quicker routes to your Vision.

Now take off your mask and go Fail your way to Success!

Let me know how you do with it, and the results you create.

November 2, 2007 | Filed Under Ideas, Processes, Vision | Leave a Comment 

SMALL BUSINESS ACCELERATION - BE THE LEADER!

By Linda Feinholz, “Your High Payoff Catalyst”

“I’m too small to be a Leader. We don’t need to spend any time on that!”

Those were the words from my small business client, Paul. He didn’t mean that he was too short. He meant that in his mind, his $4 million business was too small to need a ‘leader.’

After all, he wasn’t running a computer software company or a car manufacturer, ‘just a local services business.’

He brought me in to work with his management team on improving their overall performance. The company had been started by his father, a selling dynamo and charmer who had everyone who worked for him happy when he walked through the offices. “Dad” turned the business over to Paul when he decided to retire up the coast with Mom.

The company’s facilities services business had a good reputation and customers who were generally satisfied with the services. But those same customers’ internal business goals of cost containment meant they were always willing to entertain lower priced proposals from the competition.

Paul was suddenly wearing both the Sales Manager hat, and also the President hat. He’d been wearing that sales hat for 18 years, and he didn’t know what a President’s hat was supposed to look like.

Since Dad’s retirement, the company had undergone steady erosion from competition and constant turnover of the junior staff. And Paul was tired of feeling like the company was stalled.

Paul asked me to work with him and his managers to get them refocused and into action growing their business. I found they were stuck with all the common challenges of small businesses:

  • Key decision makers were feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of the business
  • Work groups were silo’ed as each ‘manager’ tried to carve out their turf and have a sense of control
  • Meetings were more about disagreements than using information to make decisions
  • Sales plans had bigger goals without describing the targets for the sales team
  • Staff felt like “It’s just a job” and were on the look out for more pay

And so on.

Paul’s initial reaction to the idea of Leadership was typical. Many small business owners, entrepreneurs, and even professionals view their sphere of influence with a ‘small’ lens. They believe their company or their department needs to hit some mythical size, often ten times it’s current sales, before having a ‘Leader’ is important.

What they don’t understand is that even a two-person partnership needs ‘leadership time’ to grow and thrive.

  • Each business needs a Vision that inspires everyone who shows up to work to bring their best experience, intelligence and efforts with them each day.
  • Each person in every company needs a sense of being acknowledged, assisted and appreciated or their attention drifts off to other areas than the purpose of their work.
  • Each manager needs a model for how to build a business case for the items that needed decisions across functional areas.

And each business owner, key decision maker, manager needs to use the simple leadership techniques that hold the entire work effort together, and keep it focused forward.

Leadership is the series of activities that take place when the rat race of running a business is paused for a moment and one person communicates directly with the heart of the others in their business.

Paul’s notion was that Leadership would divert his attention from managing the business’s sales. He couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s as relevant for the owner of a small business as it is for the Leader of a mega corporation.

Whether I’m consulting to an individual company, or coaching MasterMind groups of professionals who want to grow their business, the key I’m teaching each person is that small efforts have enormous payoffs.

For Paul that meant we started him with three easy High Payoff Leadership steps:

  • Inspiring his sales force with measurable sales targets: tripling the number of boutique hotels the company served in a 20-mile radius in the next 18 months.
  • Empowering each of the functional areas of the company to design and deliver services packages for that target market that kept those customers delighted and staying with the company.
  • Encouraging his staff by running meetings where he kept sharing how proud he was that the team was going after and winning the business that fit their targets.

In total, those activities required that Paul learn 5 new ways of talking about business, and took only 35 minutes per week of his time.

In one month his team’s time spent in meetings shortened by 30%. In four months the company had no turnover. In six months they had doubled their business in their target market.

Isn’t it time you put High Payoff Leadership on your calendar?

October 18, 2007 | Filed Under Inspiration, Leadership, Vision | Leave a Comment 

Change”1 Reminder” And You Can Change It All!

When was the last time you had your Vision in mind?

It seems that the busier we get the quicker it slips away from us.

If you’re running a business day in and day out, you need a mechanism that will keep bringing your attention to the top level. A way of getting out of the details so that you remember the purpose as you review each of your challenges.

Now ask yourself:

“What do I have in front of me at all times that
keeps me focused on achieving your success?”

In print. In an image. In living color with words and pictures that remind you at a glance and help you anchor your attention back on the big picture. Get your Vision in front of you.

It will help you rapidly sort out what’s important and what’s fluff. What’s urgent and what is just a distraction from getting what really needs doing done.

October 14, 2007 | Filed Under Inspiration, Vision | Leave a Comment 

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