There really is no magic bullet for success. There are a host of things that one must do in order to ultimately achieve the success that they desire. There is a basic framework though that put you on and keep you on the right path. This framework consists of three simple to say, sometimes hard to do principles.
1. You must have a belief in yourself and you product/service.
2. You must take action and pursue your goal, not be passive and wait for it.
3. You must be disciplined enough to evaluate yourself and your project, change when necessary, but keep going no matter what.
If you don't believe in yourself, it really doesn't matter what you do, you will fail. If you put forth the negative vibes of failure, then you will look for that failure in everything that you do. Things that help are using affirmations, reading self-help books, and repeating to yourself what a few of your great qualities are. An example of this would be... "I am consistently putting forth effort that brings me results."
It is almost always the active folks that cross the success finish line first. If you are a passive person, you will tend to wait on others to take action and then see what you might do to jump on the band wagon. If you are an active person, you will tend to take the reigns of life and push forward regardless of the circumstances surrounding you.
Discipline is the elusive, yet crucial element of success that no person can succeed without. If you find yourself in a position where you look at the things that need to be done and then sigh and turn away, then you are a person in need of discipline. Self-discipline is the art and act of doing what must be or ought to be done even when others will not notice. It is the ability to take action and then receive motivation.
Even though there will never be just "one thing" that will make a person successful, there is a framework for success that you can live by. Take the time to evaluate yourself and see where you land in the 3 pieces of your success framework.
To Your Success!
Jody N Holland
MuRF Systems
www.murfsystems.com
Monday, February 28, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Step 2 To Effectiveness in Business - Plan To Win!
Those who have no plan to win will often achieve just that... not winning.
It may sound silly to some people, but the reality is that many people who go into business don't really "plan" to win. They have an idea, maybe even a brilliant one, and they take action on the idea. They don't lay out what it will actually take every day to get there though. They think, "hey, I am good at crafts, so I will open a craft store." Then, they jump out and open a craft store, sinking ALL of their available cash into the store with not plan on how to pay for it until it is profitable, or even how to make it profitable. There are three (3) key components of your winning plan. They are...
1. You must have a way to attract business.
2. You must have a way to sustain business.
3. You must have a way to manage business.
In order to attract business, you must have a presence. This can be through marketing and advertising, websites, etc. Or, it can be through networking, direct sales, and relationships. Most people rely on "old-school" marketing. They build a website and place an ad in the yellow pages and wait. To be honest, with the marketing competition in today's world, if you are going "old-school," you may as well hand paint a sign and put it on a farm-to-market road. It will get you about the same attention. We have now switched from word of mouth, to world of mouth advertising. Your social network and their potential influence are your greatest assets in attracting business. According to Good Morning America, Justin Beiber getting a hair cut caused 80,000 people to be stop following him on Twitter. He made it big as a singer because of his talent and YouTube. His friends told their friends, who told their friends, and the whole shaggy haired singing went viral.
In order to sustain business, you must have a way to service your clients and you must have something to provide on an on-going basis. Servicing your clients is more than just making sure your product works. It is really about staying connected enough to them that they feel that you are a part of their organization. If you are not a part of their culture, you will not be there long. I can't imagine drinking generic Dr. Pepper, not because it is really that different in taste, but because drinking Dr. Pepper is a part of how I define myself. It is my consumer culture model. I strive to have my clients say that they could not imagine using any training company but mine because the MuRF team is a part of how they define themselves.
In order to manage business, you must un-learn, learn, and re-learn business. There will not ever be a point where you actually know it all. Anyone who says that they know everything that there is to know about business forgot the business rule that the game is always changing. We manage business by staying a step ahead of the trends. We save money in the good times, live wisely in the slow times, and put our focus on taking our business to the next level, whatever that level is for us. As soon as you get to the point of "resting" in business, you will only manage to go backwards. Perhaps the most difficult part though is managing ourselves in business. It is easy to do the easy things. It is difficult to do the correct things. If you want to manage, then read and learn. If you want to kill the business, then assume you know it all.
By not taking the right steps and following a plan in business, people are simply setting themselves up to fail. Many people actually go into business to "Try" to succeed. The one consistent thing that I have seen in great entrepreneurs is that they have NO backup plan. They are there to win at this game, and there are no other games that are possible for them. Remove the idea of falling back on something else and you learn to focus your efforts more intensely on what you are doing now.
I wish you all the best success!
Jody Holland
MuRF Systems
www.murfsystems.com
It may sound silly to some people, but the reality is that many people who go into business don't really "plan" to win. They have an idea, maybe even a brilliant one, and they take action on the idea. They don't lay out what it will actually take every day to get there though. They think, "hey, I am good at crafts, so I will open a craft store." Then, they jump out and open a craft store, sinking ALL of their available cash into the store with not plan on how to pay for it until it is profitable, or even how to make it profitable. There are three (3) key components of your winning plan. They are...
1. You must have a way to attract business.
2. You must have a way to sustain business.
3. You must have a way to manage business.
In order to attract business, you must have a presence. This can be through marketing and advertising, websites, etc. Or, it can be through networking, direct sales, and relationships. Most people rely on "old-school" marketing. They build a website and place an ad in the yellow pages and wait. To be honest, with the marketing competition in today's world, if you are going "old-school," you may as well hand paint a sign and put it on a farm-to-market road. It will get you about the same attention. We have now switched from word of mouth, to world of mouth advertising. Your social network and their potential influence are your greatest assets in attracting business. According to Good Morning America, Justin Beiber getting a hair cut caused 80,000 people to be stop following him on Twitter. He made it big as a singer because of his talent and YouTube. His friends told their friends, who told their friends, and the whole shaggy haired singing went viral.
In order to sustain business, you must have a way to service your clients and you must have something to provide on an on-going basis. Servicing your clients is more than just making sure your product works. It is really about staying connected enough to them that they feel that you are a part of their organization. If you are not a part of their culture, you will not be there long. I can't imagine drinking generic Dr. Pepper, not because it is really that different in taste, but because drinking Dr. Pepper is a part of how I define myself. It is my consumer culture model. I strive to have my clients say that they could not imagine using any training company but mine because the MuRF team is a part of how they define themselves.
In order to manage business, you must un-learn, learn, and re-learn business. There will not ever be a point where you actually know it all. Anyone who says that they know everything that there is to know about business forgot the business rule that the game is always changing. We manage business by staying a step ahead of the trends. We save money in the good times, live wisely in the slow times, and put our focus on taking our business to the next level, whatever that level is for us. As soon as you get to the point of "resting" in business, you will only manage to go backwards. Perhaps the most difficult part though is managing ourselves in business. It is easy to do the easy things. It is difficult to do the correct things. If you want to manage, then read and learn. If you want to kill the business, then assume you know it all.
By not taking the right steps and following a plan in business, people are simply setting themselves up to fail. Many people actually go into business to "Try" to succeed. The one consistent thing that I have seen in great entrepreneurs is that they have NO backup plan. They are there to win at this game, and there are no other games that are possible for them. Remove the idea of falling back on something else and you learn to focus your efforts more intensely on what you are doing now.
I wish you all the best success!
Jody Holland
MuRF Systems
www.murfsystems.com
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Step 1 To Effectiveness In Business...
In order to succeed, one must always begin with a picture of the "end-game." --Jody Holland
In order to find success in business, your job, or almost any other endeavor, you have to begin with the end in mind. If you don't know where you plan on finishing, you will likely run in the wrong direction. For many business owners and entrepreneurs, this is known as their "exit strategy."
Life is a gamble. We take risks every day in order to move forward, upward, and onward. You can, however, minimize the level of risk if you can think in reverse. This process involves defining what your success points are and then working backwards to identify each of the steps along the way that must be achieved. If you can use your deductive reasoning skills, then you can identify what would have had to happen in order to reach each milestone. As things change or obstacles arise, you simply work from the next milestone back to where you are, at the obstacle, and identify what else will have to happen to stay on the path.
There are times that you change your definition of success or what the view of the end-game is. If that is the case, work back again and redefine what it will take NOW. An exercise that has always been helpful to me is to define in the present tense what that end-view is like. If it is 5 years out, write out...
Today is February 18, 2016 and my company is worth XXX, my employees are XXX, etc. You are thinking in the present tense in order to make it real to both the conscious and sub-conscious portions of the brain.
I would love to hear about what your picture of success looks like. Leave me a comment with what you are seeking to accomplish or what your technique for future-visioning is.
To your success!
Jody Holland
MuRF
In order to find success in business, your job, or almost any other endeavor, you have to begin with the end in mind. If you don't know where you plan on finishing, you will likely run in the wrong direction. For many business owners and entrepreneurs, this is known as their "exit strategy."
Life is a gamble. We take risks every day in order to move forward, upward, and onward. You can, however, minimize the level of risk if you can think in reverse. This process involves defining what your success points are and then working backwards to identify each of the steps along the way that must be achieved. If you can use your deductive reasoning skills, then you can identify what would have had to happen in order to reach each milestone. As things change or obstacles arise, you simply work from the next milestone back to where you are, at the obstacle, and identify what else will have to happen to stay on the path.
There are times that you change your definition of success or what the view of the end-game is. If that is the case, work back again and redefine what it will take NOW. An exercise that has always been helpful to me is to define in the present tense what that end-view is like. If it is 5 years out, write out...
Today is February 18, 2016 and my company is worth XXX, my employees are XXX, etc. You are thinking in the present tense in order to make it real to both the conscious and sub-conscious portions of the brain.
I would love to hear about what your picture of success looks like. Leave me a comment with what you are seeking to accomplish or what your technique for future-visioning is.
To your success!
Jody Holland
MuRF
Monday, February 14, 2011
Success Principle 12 - The Little Me Needs To Die Principle
Each of us has two sides to "self." One is in charge, but the other creates our world. --Jody Holland
Some people refer to the duality of self in terms of the conscious and subconscious minds. The subconscious mind carries out orders, creates the world around us, and determines our fate. Tbe conscious mind gives the instructions to the subconscious mind and "programs" it for either success or failure. Just like a software program, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. What we listen to, what we read, who we hang around, and the what we ultimately accept are programming languages that we use. If you have bad code, you get bad software. Accepting the negatives in life as real will put you into a place where you end up spewing negatives back out.
If you spew enough negative on the people around you, they will react in the way you expected them to in the first place. The funny thing about our minds is that the mind will initate your actions in order to get the result that it was looking for in the first place. John Lubbock once said, "We get whatever we look for." So the question is, what are we looking for?
The easy way to determine what you are REALLY looking for is to look at what you are getting. If you want different results, you have to play a different game. For the next week, only 7 days, see if you can think only positive thoughts. Notice that I did not say that you should only say and do positive things. I said "think" only positive thoughts. This challenge is just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else. It does make a difference though.
The little me is the conscious mind that tells me that I cannot do something, that people don't like me, or that I am not good, fast, smart, tough enough. This is the "me" that needs to die! I want the positive me to live and the negative me to die. What part of you is it that needs to die? Can the right attitude do the trick for you? I think it can!
To your success!
Jody Holland
MuRF Systems
Some people refer to the duality of self in terms of the conscious and subconscious minds. The subconscious mind carries out orders, creates the world around us, and determines our fate. Tbe conscious mind gives the instructions to the subconscious mind and "programs" it for either success or failure. Just like a software program, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. What we listen to, what we read, who we hang around, and the what we ultimately accept are programming languages that we use. If you have bad code, you get bad software. Accepting the negatives in life as real will put you into a place where you end up spewing negatives back out.
If you spew enough negative on the people around you, they will react in the way you expected them to in the first place. The funny thing about our minds is that the mind will initate your actions in order to get the result that it was looking for in the first place. John Lubbock once said, "We get whatever we look for." So the question is, what are we looking for?
The easy way to determine what you are REALLY looking for is to look at what you are getting. If you want different results, you have to play a different game. For the next week, only 7 days, see if you can think only positive thoughts. Notice that I did not say that you should only say and do positive things. I said "think" only positive thoughts. This challenge is just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else. It does make a difference though.
The little me is the conscious mind that tells me that I cannot do something, that people don't like me, or that I am not good, fast, smart, tough enough. This is the "me" that needs to die! I want the positive me to live and the negative me to die. What part of you is it that needs to die? Can the right attitude do the trick for you? I think it can!
To your success!
Jody Holland
MuRF Systems
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Success Principle 11 - The Warrior Principle
"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." --Sun Tzu
Everything that we face in this life is a battle. Some battles are easy to face, while others are difficult to even show up for. It is often not the midst of the battle that we fear, but the anticipation of the battle. We fear the idea of facing challenges, the idea of rejection, the thought of whether or not we can succeed. Some people even face the fear of what they will be like if and when they do succeed.
As an entrepreneur, I face the unknown every day. I am unsure of where the next contract will come from, what the next product will be, and even if I will be given the opportunity to continue serving clients.
When I was young and had just begun taking martial arts, I used to worry about whether or not I would get hurt in a sparring match. My instructor told me to change my focus. I was to stop thinking about the past, or the future. I was to simply live in the present moment. If you are able to clear your mind and focus on the next 5 minutes, without regard for the last 5 or the 5 after that, you can find the bliss of being in the now. When a person is building their business, that is exactly what they have to do.
Successful entrepreneurs know what needs to be done NOW in order to be immediately successful. Warriors focus on the present moment, no fear of the future, no regrets in the past, just this time. If you string together enough "nows" then you will find the success you are looking for and a whole lot more. As a business warrior, I would challenge you to identify the things that you must do in the now in order to be successful.
Happiness comes from living in the present moment. What can you do in the next 5 minutes to truly live and to succeed?
To Your Success!
Jody Holland
MuRF
Everything that we face in this life is a battle. Some battles are easy to face, while others are difficult to even show up for. It is often not the midst of the battle that we fear, but the anticipation of the battle. We fear the idea of facing challenges, the idea of rejection, the thought of whether or not we can succeed. Some people even face the fear of what they will be like if and when they do succeed.
As an entrepreneur, I face the unknown every day. I am unsure of where the next contract will come from, what the next product will be, and even if I will be given the opportunity to continue serving clients.
When I was young and had just begun taking martial arts, I used to worry about whether or not I would get hurt in a sparring match. My instructor told me to change my focus. I was to stop thinking about the past, or the future. I was to simply live in the present moment. If you are able to clear your mind and focus on the next 5 minutes, without regard for the last 5 or the 5 after that, you can find the bliss of being in the now. When a person is building their business, that is exactly what they have to do.
Successful entrepreneurs know what needs to be done NOW in order to be immediately successful. Warriors focus on the present moment, no fear of the future, no regrets in the past, just this time. If you string together enough "nows" then you will find the success you are looking for and a whole lot more. As a business warrior, I would challenge you to identify the things that you must do in the now in order to be successful.
Happiness comes from living in the present moment. What can you do in the next 5 minutes to truly live and to succeed?
To Your Success!
Jody Holland
MuRF
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