Self Employed Success

Two days after celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday in late October, my throat got that tell-tale scratchy feeling. You know the one. It’s predicts the advent of the dreaded November Bronchitis season for me.

I seemed to be able to fight off this first round in early November before it became full-blown, but the dry cough lingered all month, making for some very interesting teleclasses. “What would you do if <cough> your email campaign results <cough, cough> returned less than a one percent click-through rate <cough>?”

But my energy was up and I was lulled into a false sense of security, taking walks by the canal and visiting the new BJ’s Wholesale Club in town to take a gander at the high-def TVs. Big mistake. By last Wednesday, I had fever and chills, the lungs clogged up like a beaver dam, and I was forced to the doctor’s office once again. I had to miss the family Thanksgiving dinner, cancel a new class that was to have started on Tuesday, and cancel a speech I was to give at the ICF Conference in Orlando this week.

This happens to a lot of small business owners. We work hard, our adrenaline is up, and colds and flu seem to avoid us. But the minute you relax, the minute you take a vacation or end a big project, POW…you get sick. I used to think my annual bronchitis was tied to my airplane trips to England (my husband is from England and we visit his parents once a year). But I began to realize it wasn’t the airplane’s fault, per se, but it was because I was relaxed and on vacation — typically after working like a crazy person the week before to “catch up” before vacation started.

Now that I’m flat on my back this week, I’m going to ponder a new routine, a new way of both working and relaxing that keeps my equilibrium and my immune system in balance. First thing I did was take my six-page To Do list and reduce it to three pages. (Boy, that felt GREAT!)

If you’re like me, you get very excited about the projects you work on and enthusiastic about working with your clients and students, and your mind is always going a mile-a-minute with ideas. But there’s a price to pay for trying to do it all.

P.S. I’ll miss everyone at the ICF Conference! I hope you have a great time!

P.P.S Does this happen to you? What advice do you have for me? 

I made an amazing discovery last month. Like you, I’m a busy business owner. Yet I need to continually learn new marketing techniques, new business ideas, etc. in order to maintain my “expert” status in my field.

Where was I going to find time to do all that reading, listening, and studying???

As with most successful projects, lifelong learning is about two things: structure and discipline.

If you took six hours a week to learn something new (read a book, listen to an audio program, take a teleclass), you’d have completed 312 hours of learning new material a year. That’s equivalent to over SIX college-level courses.

If you want to be known as an expert, you must be willing to invest six hours a week to “sharpening the saw” of your knowledge.

The way I do it is this: I’m taking off every Friday for the next year, to read, take classes, learn. From 9:00 – 3:00 I’ll read a book to read, listen to an audio program on MP3, watch a DVD, read websites, or take classes.

A colleague of mine uses her exercise time to listen to audios. Another colleague signs up for one class a month, each and every month of the year. One of my clients takes a weekly trip to the library (“The only place I can find some quiet!” he says) and reads a book for a few hours.

You can do this, too. Maybe you take one hour a day as your Learning Time. Maybe you schedule one day per week. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you schedule the time into your calendar and religiously adhere to your learning schedule.

When you think “300 hours” it’s overwhelming.

When you think “1 hour a day” it’s empowering!

I’m always nagging my clients about being accountable: doing what they say they’re going to do and running their businesses according to their personal values. Now it’s time to turn the tables!

This is my desk. It’s a great desk. It does exactly what I need it to do, and never complains.

But I’ve neglected it for two weeks, just kept piling papers on top of papers. No excuse, really. Just lazy.

Today is “Clean My Desk Before It Rebels Day.”

It’s now 1:45 PM eastern. I promise you, by 4:00 PM eastern, this desk will be SPOTLESS! All tasks completed, all papers corralled, everything in its proper home. Heck, I’ll even give it a dusting off, too, just for good measure.

This is what I posted on Facebook and Twitter, asking my social media friends to help me be accountable: “Time me. If I don’t complete this task, ridicule me. Nag me. Don’t let me off the hook!”

A LITTLE WHILE LATER…

It’s 3:50 and I’m done! Thanks for all your support!

You can see the whole process, start to finish, here.

In the small business world, where practically everyone is time-constrained, it’s sometimes difficult to give your best to every customer, every project, every task. This is what I discovered over the years: that giving your best to everything you do is so important that there’s rarely an excuse for not reaching for your highest potential.

The problem seems to come into play with competing values: you value your customers but you also value time with your children; you value creating a great service or product but you also value getting it done and moving onto something new.

I don’t believe multi-tasking is the answer. Instead, study yourself and ask yourself, “What are the things that are the most important to me in my life and business?”

By the way, there is no perfect answer to this question, and the things you value can be a moving target based on goals and events. If your child is in the hospital, then your business may take a back seat for a while. If you’re really excited about a new service or product you’re creating, you may choose to work weekends in order to bring it to fruition. If money is tight you may choose to do some parts of your project or marketing as inexpensively as possible.

Once you consciously decide what’s of most value to you, then go ahead and give it your very, very best. Don’t skimp and cut corners. Push yourself to be excellent in those areas that are important to you. It’s okay to make mistakes in your pursuit of excellence, as long as you attempt to correct them (or at least learn from them!)

As Nora Roberts says, “Flaws are acceptable, even necessary, to make us human and humble. But to serve a guest or a customer less than the best one is capable of, strikes me as arrogant or sloppy. Often both.”

The only trap you need to avoid is the one where you want to give your best to every single person you encounter, to every single task you do. Give yourself a break from perfectionism and make a choice to give your very best only to those things that are high on your “Things I Value” list. Things that are unimportant should be dealt with quickly so that you can focus your time, attention and passion on the things that need your best work.

Your customers deserve your very best efforts and they’ll greatly appreciate it. And when they’re happy, they’re more likely to tell others about your quality products and services.

I figure it this way: a good reputation is something to value highly and work towards. Doing my best brings me joy and satisfaction. Doing better than my best, continually growing and challenging myself, is one of the main reasons I’m self-employed. Is it one of your values, too?

Here’s a great blog entry for all small business owners, from Marnie Pehrson:

Everything I Needed to Know About Personality Types I Learned in Little League Basketball

Good insights!

Who creates your calendar and books every waking moment of your time? Who asks you to work evenings and weekends to grow your business? Who forces you to work with clients who are not really a good match, or pushes you to sell, sell, sell when you are tired or sick?

Being self employed means you are the boss. You set the agenda. Alan Weiss has written a good blog post about it here.

If you’re unhappy with the way your business is going or how hard you are working, go look in the mirror. And ask yourself: Am I working hard because I have to — or because I THINK I have to?

Sure, there are times when we have to put in that extra effort to get a project done before a deadline. But there are too many self-employed people who complain that they are working 60- and 80-hour work weeks, as if working hard (to the point of illness sometimes!) is going to get you “extra credit” points in Heaven.

StartUp Nation reports from a survey: “80% of small business owners planned to work during the holiday break. 56% said they would even interrupt holiday dinner for an important customer phone call. ”

Did I hear that wrong??? You would interrupt dinner with your family to take a business call on a holiday???

The American Work Ethic tells us we have to work hard to be a good person, a good provider, a good citizen. I’m not against working hard, but if you are working hard all the time, perhaps now is the time to ask yourself, Have I taken the American Work Ethic too far? What’s the point of being self-employed if my boss is a tyrant?

And the next time you are feeling overworked and overwhelmed, cancel an appointment and go for a walk or take a nap. You can’t work at peak performance 24-hours a day.

(P.S. I give you permission to take next Friday off from work. I’m going to!)

Many small business owners feel overwhelmed with what they have to do and the time constraints they have for accomplishing both big goals and everyday tasks.

On NPR last week, I heard an interview with Zack Hample (who wrote a book about baseball). Zack has a 203 pound rubber band ball in his home. The interviewer asked Zack if he was obsessive. Zack replies,

“I started working on that thing when I was four. So we’re talking about decades here, and it’s not like I work on it every day. Sometimes I’ll add a pound a day for a week, then I won’t touch it for a year. So, y’know, you work on something for a few decades, it’s going to be BIG and CRAZY if you stick with it.”

Building a business, building your dream, will take time and tenacity. But if you really want it, work on it a little every day with the knowledge that it will become what you want in time.

It seems to be a trend that’s growing: small business owners are getting distracted by too many ideas or the latest fad, going off in a million directions and never completing anything. This loss of focus is costing small business owners hundreds of hours a year in lost productivity, lost hours, lost dollars.

It even has a name: SOS – Shiny Object Syndrome. It’s not quite ADD/ADHD. It’s more that a new idea captures your imagination and attention in such a way that you get distracted from the bigger picture and go off in tangents instead of remaining focused on the goal.

We think of a new idea, we hear of a great new gadget or marketing technique, and ZOOM, we’re off! There’s great energy and excitement in starting something new.

Of course what happens is that that everything always gets started, but nothing ever gets finished. In addition, countless hours and dollars are wasted in pursuit of the new, shiny object without having thought through whether this new item, technique, service or product is “right” for your business.

Lest you think that it’s only us small business owners who suffer from it, you’ll be happy to know that it’s rampant in many industries. Software and tech companies are notorious for following every cool new fad that comes along, without thinking strategically about whether it’s a good fit for their business model. TV creates shows around SOS, then dumps the show after 6 or 8 episodes. Big business follows every business development fad that comes out in books or gurus, only to drop it when the next cool fad arrives. Countless people have started blogs and abandoned them within a year (or less!) because they got tired of writing posts — or worse, no one was reading the posts.

I know it’s hard not to get excited about every new idea that comes past you. Some of them are very, very cool. But you are running a business and you must stop and ask yourself:

• Is this right for my business?
• Do my customers want this, and are they willing to pay for it?
• Do I have the time, resources, energy, and money to put into this to make it successful?
• Do I have too many open projects sitting on my desk that need to be finished before I begin something new?
• Do I have the ability to finish this new project, and implement it, and maintain it?
• What has to drop off my radar in order for me to start something new?

There’s nothing wrong with loving innovation. Just make sure you don’t lose focus on what’s most important for you, your business and your customers.

Do you feel like a fake? Are you waiting for the day that someone will discover that all your success was brought about by luck?

You’re not alone.

According to this article in Inc. Magazine, as many as 70% of all people feel like a fake at some time. Back in the 1970’s, psychologists studied this phenomenon, dubbed “The Imposter Syndrome.”

The Imposter Syndrome is divided into three sub-categories:

• Feeling like a fake
• Attributing success to luck
• Discounting and downplaying success

And it isn’t just new entrepreneurs that feel this way. According to this article from CalTech, it’s the high-achievers and the already-successful who suffer the most. The CalTech article goes on to discuss ways you can overcome your Imposter Feelings.

This topic came up recently at one of my mastermind group meetings. A mastermind participant, a highly-successful and sought-after author and entrepreneur, said she was just waiting for someone to discover that she didn’t know anything, really, about her topic because she didn’t have a Ph.D. (although she’s written three books on the topic, has studied it for over 10 years, has major sponsorship endorsements from large corporations, and an education and product line to go along with the books). Her worst fear: that some interviewer will ask, “Who are YOU to write about this topic??”

In the end analysis, a reality-check is in order. Have you accomplished things because of your intellect, your creativity, your tenacity, your heart? For every failure you’ve had, haven’t you also had an equal success?

Each day, when you catch yourself in the bad habit of moaning about everything that went wrong, reach for “balance” and remind yourself of all the things you did right. And when you have a big success, reward yourself and celebrate this wonderful moment!

As many of you know, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is one of my all-time favorite books. I can remember reading it back in the 1980s and I always re-read it every five years or so.

Written in the 1930s, this book is both a classic AND very modern. But the older version had some dated references to culture, politics, business and life during the Great Depression. Now the best thing has happened: They’ve given the book a face-lift, updating it for today’s reader without losing all the wisdom held within.

If you haven’t read Think and Grow Rich, now is your time! And if you’ve read an older version, I think this updated version will be a welcome addition to your self-development library.