T'was the night before Christmas...

Spreading a little seasonal cheer; here's our last blog of 2013.  

Merry Christmas one and all, we look forward to helping you to achieve your business dreams in 2014! 

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, except for the man with no business nowse;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

But business had been tough so they were filled with thin air;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of ipods and laptops danced in their heads;

Mamma downed gin in her grief, and he wrung his hands in lap,

There was no chance here of a long winter's nap,

When from my phone there arose such a clatter,

A new email offered a solution to the matter.

Away to the computer I flew like a flash,

Here was a business coach who could help me to earn more cash.

The text on the screen described things he needed to know,

Like how to double profit and make your business grow,

And what to his wondering eyes did appear,

But the business solutions he'd been waiting for his entire career,

With a little hard work, results could be quick,

He knew in that moment this coach could make things click,

More rapid than eagles he wrote down the name,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:

"Now, Momentum ! I need to be a winner! My business troubles need fix'in!

On, Profit! on, Team! on, Sales and Cash flowin'!

From the top of the drain an over this wall!

Now coach away! coach away! coach away all!"

As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;

So up together he and his coach flew,

With the armoury full of strategies, and a firm commitment too—

And then, in a twinkling, He soon saw the proof

The dancing that signalled profit had gone through the roof.

Like the dreams he had had in his head, business was turning around,

Achievement and success were now a bound.

His coach had assured no more trouble would be a foot,

And no more did his eyes look tarnished with bags of soot;

A bundle of gifts he had been able to buy back,

And he looked in amazement and how close he'd been to giving his business the sack.

His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His happy little mouth was drawn up like a bow,

Even the grey hair on his head had ceased to grow;

Misery had gone-no longer the need to clench his teeth,

And happiness, it encircled his family like a wreath;

Plenty of profit ensured never an empty belly

And he scoffed at talk of recessions on telly.

Coaching made life easy and gave him back his umpf, his jolly old self,

And He laughed when he saw his products fly off shelf;

A change to routine, time to clear his head

Soon gave him to know He had nothing to dread;

He felt once more a true love for his work,

And realised waiting this long to get help had made him a jerk,

And laying his finger aside of his nose,

This is a secret that not every business owner knows;

He sprang to his laptop , to email his friends as quick as a whistle,

To boost their businesses he knew a coach would be beneficial .

So if you're ready for change and need help to achieve all you might—

A coach from momentum could certainly see you right!

A merry Christmas to you all and to all a good night!

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."

If something isn't working, we've got to stop, figure out why and then try something new! 

If there's no return on your marketing investment, why would you plough more money into repeating the same failed exercise again? If you've got an employee not making the grade, why continue to employ them? And if you've got a client who doesn't pay, why continue to give your stock away for free? 

It's common sense, you would think, yet I see these issues time and time again. Perseverance is great, but being blindly stubborn will get you nowhere.  Simply put, if you always do what you've always done, you will always get what you've always got, so if you're not happy with what you're getting from your business, it's time to change what you are doing in your business.  Quit the bad habits and those proven unsuccessful enterprises that waste time, energy and money.

In two weeks’ time, as the end of the year approaches, some of us will make New Year’s Resolutions, some of us will already be thinking about what we can do to make next year a more successful year.  I am asking you this week to not only think about what you can do, but also to think about what you need NOT to do and what you need to QUIT doing.  Stop being the fool and get clever about how you can improve your business in 2014.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."

Sometimes us business owners can be a little too persevering, too trying and are blinded by our own stubbornness to allow our businesses to move forward as successfully and as easily as they might. Have you ever heard a disheartened business owner exclaim, "we've run this marketing campaign three times already and we still haven't seen any increase in sales!' ? Or the overly patient business owner who confides that their sales person, "didn't meet this month's target again," but nothing changes so next month they have the same failure to meet target once more? How about the stubborn business owner who has clients with hundreds or even thousands of outstanding pounds in bills overdue, but they continue to provide further goods and services because, "well surely they will pay up eventually," yet the debtors just keep on growing and growing and the cash flow dwindles smaller and smaller?

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?  Well here's where the second part of the quotation comes into play; if you've tried and tried and things still aren't working, don't keep trying the same thing again; that's madness! Doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results is a fool's errand. 

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."

As anyone who follows me on Twitter (SusanGallagher@susanMPC) will already know, I am fond of the inspirational quote or two; I like read and hear what little pearls of wisdom others have to offer and see if I can't glean some insight, knowledge or lesson from them myself. After all, none of us is individually are as smart as all of us combined. This week I came across a quotation that really struck a chord with me and it’s with this quotation that I want to base this week's writing:

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."
W.C. Fields

So, I know it's not the most linguistically beautiful quotation you've ever come across, but the sentiment is precisely right and incredibly relevant to a great many of you I'm sure.

As business owners, we must have no small measure of perseverance; no business can succeed without it. At some point or another, we have all felt tested by the challenges of running a business and thought (even fleetingly and in private) that it would be easier to give up on that client, that contract, that target or goal. However, we are all still in business and thriving so we must have chosen to persevere. That's where the first part of this quote comes in; the willingness to try, try again and the desire to achieve success.

Vision, planning and achieving your business dreams

Once you have your vision and you know what successes you want to achieve in your business long term, then you will be ready to start planning on how to go about making your next year brilliant, gaining success and enabling your business to grant you the wishes and dreams you deserve to have come true.

Develop your vision and then talk to us about how to plan for your success in 2014:

Critical to the Success and Outstanding Results that our Clients achieve is attendance at our 90 Day Ultimate Planning Workshops where they plan and construct their activities to ensure that they maintain momentum and continue to achieve their goals and dreams…

Now you can join them and come and attend this Powerful One Day event that will give you the inspiration, ideas and strategies you need to make 2014 your best year ever..

Here’s what you will get from the day…

·       Over 350 marketing strategies to build your profits right away.

·       Understand the secrets of business growth

·       Tactics to enable you to build a winning team

·       Simple tools to help you get more done in less time

·       Tips on how to track your progress

·       Achievable 12 month goals clearly defined

·       Network with other like-minded business owners

·       Direction and clarity of Vision

·       Inspiration from like-minded Business Owners

·       New confidence in building the business you really deserve

·       Great ideas from two of the top Coaches in the Business

An OUTSTANDING Day is Guaranteed to everyone who attends…

Places are limited so book now to avoid disappointment…

Vision, planning and achieving your business dreams

Developing a vision for your business is the first step. It’s this process that enables you to visualise where you want your business to go, not just in the next year, but in the next 5 years, 10 years, or even longer.  When you embark on your planning you can break this down into smaller chunks and targets in individual year, quarters, months, days, but a vision isn’t about the everyday, so think big and think long term.  Your vision can then inform your day to day running of your business because, like a guiding light in the distance, you will always have a point of focus leading you in the right direction.

If your vision is going to inform the running of your business, it must be clear and it should be specific; no woolly ifs, buts or maybes and no vague or non-descript aims, and it should be aspirational; this is not the place for humble humility.  Take Apple for example, their vision and mission statement is, “To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.”  Now love or loathe Apple, this vision for the company to ‘advance humankind’ is clear, specific and aspirational and you can well imagine the boffins in the development workshops and research labs standing around their latest prospective product quizzing each other, “yes, but will this advance humankind?” Simply, if their answer is “no” then the team will know it’s time to get back to the drawing board!

Which leads us to the next crucial step in building your vision for your business; your vision should be articulated and shared with your team so that you can all share in it, become invested in it and motivated towards it.  A vision achieves nothing scrawled on the back of an old envelope or crumpled post-it note stuffed down the back of a desk drawer!  Commit it to paper, share it, display it and strive towards it every day!

To read more on developing a vision for your business and planning to achieve your business dreams, catch the next instalment of this week's blog on Tuesday.

Fail to plan, plan to fail and PLAN TO FAIL!

It is said that we learn twice as much from failure as we do from success and that’s the kind of progress we could all do with making.

Now, I’m not suggesting, you start planning to fail by gambling your profits in a risky investment that all logic is telling you is likely to fail, but rather take those measured risks that you can afford to fail without devastating consequences.  We can sometimes get too familiar with where we are at or we are; what is better known as in our comfort zone.  The question is though, "is a comfort zone comfortable?" Not necessarily. In actual fact, familiarity zone may be a better description. Perhaps you have become familiar with only just scraping enough in together in turnover to pay out your overheads so taking a risk to actually make a profit is scary, but what if that risk pays off?

Any success you want in your life lies on the other side of your comfort/familiarity zone, so to be successful in business you need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and you need to be planning to fail on occasion so that you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start again, just like you would have done when you learned to walk.

By giving new ideas a go, you either win or you learn and both are successful outcomes so being afraid of failure is an illogical fear that you need to overcome.

Do we really need certificates to be successful?

Certainly not.  We only need one certificate; our birth certificate.  That’s the piece of paper that entitles you the opportunities required to achieve any success you can dream of. Nothing else.

If, however, you want to accelerate your success, as well as planning to fail, remember to PLAN! 

Critical to the Success and Outstanding Results our Clients achieve, is attendance at our 90 Day Ultimate Planning Workshops where they plan and construct their activities to ensure that they maintain momentum and continue to achieve their goals and dreams…

Now you can join them and come and attend this Powerful One Day event that will give you the inspiration, ideas and strategies you need to make 2014 your best year ever..

Here’s what you will get from the day…

·       Over 350 marketing strategies to build your profits right away.

·       Understand the secrets of business growth

·       Tactics  to enable you to build a winning team

·       Simple tools to help you get more done in less time

·       Tips on how to track your progress

·       Achievable 12 month goals clearly defined

·       Network with other like-minded business owners

·       Direction and clarity of Vision

·       Inspiration from like-minded Business Owners

·       New confidence in building the business you really deserve

·       Great ideas from two of the top Coaches in the Business

An OUTSTANDING Day is Guaranteed to everyone who attends…

Places are limited so book now to avoid disappointment…

www.momentumperformancecoaching.com

Fail to plan, plan to fail and PLAN TO FAIL!

So how does failure go from a necessary and positive practice required in order to learn and progress when we are children to professional suicide as an adult?

Well, we go to school and enter into the academic main stream whereby we learn that from that point onwards we are going to be judged; judged on our progress, our ability, our success.  We are set targets and we are given expectations for our performance and not achieving these targets, we are labelled as failures who are under achieving, unsatisfactory or inadequate when compared with our peers. 

Those of you with children will know that this is even worse for pupils today; there are curricula now set from nursery school so we begin assessing the ability of our babies as well as our children nowadays!  Society places a huge emphasis on the merit and importance of certificates that represent academic achievement and ability and we are told that without these remarkable pieces of paper, our opportunities to achieve success are greatly inhibited, if not withdrawn entirely.

So we leave school and take our new learned fear of failure into business.  We become risk averse and do all we can to avoid risk.  We have learned to play it safe and this can severely stunt the growth of our business. If we never take any risks, we can never enjoy the learning that accompanies a win or failure, we inhibit our own and businesses’ ability to grow.  A business can never outgrow its leader and if that leader is impeded by a crippling fear of failure, then they and their business will remain in a limbo of mediocrity.  

There is a clear a definite need for us as business owners to reframe failure.  There is a saying we often use in our planning workshops; “Fail to plan and you plan to fail,” but this needs to be extended even more; we should also be planning to fail occasionally because to be successful in business we need to fail more and learning from those failures.  It is said that we learn twice as much from failure as we do from success and that’s the kind of progress we could all do with making.

For more on this and other ideas on how you can turn even the greatest ‘failures’ into successes, read the next instalment of this week’s blog on Tuesday.

Fail to plan, plan to fail and PLAN TO FAIL!

Following on last week’s newsletter on planning for success, this week I want to write a little bit about the barriers we have to success.

As many of my clients will know (well, my clients, my contacts, my associates and basically anyone else who has held even a one minute conversation with me lately), I am a new grandmother.  Our granddaughter is now nearly 8 months old.  Watching her lately is intriguing and even inspirational.

At the moment, Eleanor is learning to walk and, boy, is she persistent! At least a hundred times a day, she tries to get herself from lying, to sitting, to standing, to walking.  She falls, she gets frustrated, she gets back up and tries again.  This is how she will learn to walk.

We all learn to walk by falling over a lot. We are encouraged by all those around us to get up and give it another go and another go and another go until we are successful. A massive amount of praise is bestowed on us as we take those first tentative steps and even when we fail, we are celebrated for trying.

 As babies, there is nothing wrong with trying and failing; it’s just how we learn to get it right in the end, but as adults, this all changes and by the time we own and are running our own businesses failure is not just seen as a negative thing, but it seems to have connotations of weakness, inferiority, even incompetence.  So how does failure go from a necessary and positive practice required in order to learn and progress when we are children to professional suicide as an adult?

For more on this and other ideas on how you can turn even the greatest ‘failures’ into successes, read the next instalment of this week’s blog on Sunday.

Goal setting + planning = Success

Our last couple of blogs have been thinking about the reasons why television talent shows are so popular.  It’s because people love to watch others succeed, but they also get a kick out of watching people be foolish and make a mess of things (think the opening auditions of X-factor).  In business, you can watch your business thrive and succeed or you can see it flounder and fail, but you are in control of the show.  Get goal setting, get planning and start living the dream.

Below are some clear and simple tips to help you to work on goal setting and planning in your business:

Dream big!  Setting goals isn’t about the little things; breaking even isn’t a goal, it’s a necessity!  Your goals should be aspirational dreams.  Make them big, bold and brassy and that way, even if you fall a little short in the end, you will still have achieved something outstanding.

Get focused, stay focused! Setting your goals is only the first step.  If you set your goals and then forget all about them you will get no where!  Firstly, commit them to paper- there is just something definitive about writing things down that you don’t get from simply verbalising an idea.  Also, you can look at them again and again this way; display them somewhere prominent or even visualise them in a dream board to help you really focus on them!  If the dream is a holiday home in the Alps, that car, that house, whatever… print a picture of it and really see the dream, every day.  Focus on it and get it!

Smart targets-  Once you’ve got your goals and you are focused on them, break down your goals into smaller chunks and targets.  For example, if you want to increase profit, how can you do that?  Increase sales-what do you need to do? Targets, unlike goals should be Small, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time specific.  After you complete each smaller target, focus on the next and before you know if the sum of all these small targets will be the achievement of a bigger goal.

Don’t be afraid to change the plan! Whilst your goals and dreams may be relatively fixed, the path you take to reach them may not be.  Revisit your planning frequently and evaluate what is working and what isn’t.  Be proactive to change and don’t be afraid to change things if something isn’t working, don’t  just react if a plan fails come the end of the quarter, of year.

All of our clients attend our Ultimate Planning Workshops as this gives the formal time and setting for planning for their businesses and our next planning event is just around the corner.

If you believe your business would benefit from the following, visit our website or get in touch to reserve your place:

·         Over 350 marketing strategies to build your profits right away.

·         Simple tools to help you get more done in less time

·         Understand the secrets of business growth

·         How to build a winning team

·         Achievable 12 month goals clearly defined

·         Tips on how to track your progress

·         Network with other like-minded business owners

www.momentumperformancecoaching.com

Goal setting + planning = Success

A great many business owners dream big and have great aspirations when they initially start up their businesses, but as time goes on, many seem to lose sight of their goals, let alone think consciously about how they might achieve them and fewer still have a concrete plan which they follow in order to realise their goals.  But if your goals for your business are vague and unclear and you have no clear plan in place, how can you ever expect to achieve them?

Businesses without clear goals and planning are easy to spot; they often  appear to be going round and round in circles, not progressing past the same point they were at last month, last year, even last decade.  Sales may not have altered significantly in years, profits however may well be dwindling due to increasing costs eating in to them and their owners are often stressed out and plagued by confusion as to why their business is failing. 

The saying goes, “what you focus on, you get,” so if you’re focusing on nothing, guess what you get… Nothing.

What’s important then is knowing what we need to do if we want more than nothing out of our businesses! 

For simple tips to help you to work on goal setting and planning in your business catch our next blog on Tuesday.

All of our clients attend our Ultimate Planning Workshops as this gives the formal time and setting for planning for their businesses and our next planning event is just around the corner.

If you believe your business would benefit from the following, visit our website or get in touch to reserve your place:

·         Over 350 marketing strategies to build your profits right away.

·         Simple tools to help you get more done in less time

·         Understand the secrets of business growth

·         How to build a winning team

·         Achievable 12 month goals clearly defined

·         Tips on how to track your progress

·         Network with other like-minded business owners

www.momentumperformancecoaching.com

Goal setting + planning = Success

I’m not a huge fan of trashy television, but it seems that you can’t turn on the television without being bombarded by a whole host of reality TV talent contests.  Strictly Come Dancing, X Factor and I’m a Celebrity are all in full swing and they’ll be followed up by Britain’s got Talent and Dancing on Ice later in the year, not to mention the plethora of other talent shows; there’s Bake Off and Masterchef for the talented cooks, Splash for the aspiring diver and the Salon for the wannabe hairstylist… the list is never ending!  It’s incredible really that there are so many of these shows (in my opinion most of them pretty awful) and that the Television industry keeps churning them out; clearly they are a popular programme genre. 

Now, I’m no talent show connoisseur, but it strikes me that these shows have a couple of central themes and ideas that run through them; they are all about contestants who have a goal or a dream and they undertake a number of challenges and overcome certain obstacles in order to achieve that goal or dream and attain success.  In this respect, talent shows are not unlike running a business.  In order to be successful, we must have goals and dreams for our businesses and there are challenges and obstacles to overcome in order to attain success. 

However, goal setting in TV shows is pretty straight forward; become a pop star, be the best dancer, the best cook and so on.  Goal setting in business tends to be rather more complex.  So what are your business goals?  

All of our clients attend our Ultimate Planning Workshops as this gives the formal time and setting for planning for their businesses and our next planning event is just around the corner.

If you believe your business would benefit from the following, visit our website or get in touch to reserve your place:

·         Over 350 marketing strategies to build your profits right away.

·         Simple tools to help you get more done in less time

·         Understand the secrets of business growth

·         How to build a winning team

·         Achievable 12 month goals clearly defined

·         Tips on how to track your progress

·         Network with other like-minded business owners

www.momentumperformancecoaching.com

Planning for Success in your Business

Often, business owners give excuses for not planning like they are simply too busy or too bogged down in the day to day running of their business to look or think ahead and this is an easy mistake to make, but it is a false economy to buy into the belief that you’re too busy; if your planning were better, there would be systems in place to prevent this and to distribute the work load more appropriately.

As we all become expert planners at Christmas, we thought we would devise some key tips and ideas you can use to help you with planning in your business.

Test and Measure (OFTEN)

We don’t prepare, cook and serve the entire Christmas Dinner without stopping to taste things and check that they’re going to be well received.  Realising the turkey is raw on carving is not the desired outcome!  The same is true of planning in your business.  You don’t want to set your goals at the end of this year and then wait until the end of next year to check on whether you’ve attained them.  Rather, set your goals, break them down into smaller, achievable targets and then devise your plan on how to achieve each goal.  Then review, test that you’re on track to meet these targets, measure your progress so far frequently throughout the year in order to be able to determine whether the strategies you’ve devised are working and so that you can plan further course of action to undertake either to continue in the same vein or to address a problem if there is one within plenty of time to still enable you to meet your goal.  

One of the first things we recommend to all of our clients is to attend our 90 day planning workshops as this gives the formal time and setting for planning for their businesses and our next planning event is just around the corner.  For more information, visit the events page on our website:

www.momentumperformancecoaching.com

Thoughts:

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

Alan Lakein

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”
Thomas A. Edison

“Think ahead. Don't let day-to-day operations drive out planning.”
Donald Rumsfeld

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.”
Winston Churchill

“Time = Life, therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life.”

 Alan Lakein

Planning for Success in your Business

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”

Alan Lakein

It’s that time of year again when, love it or loathe it, we must all acknowledge that Christmas is well and truly on its way.  The shops have been gradually filling with seasonal decorations, foods and gifts; our children, grandchildren and husbands, wife’s and partners (big Kids) have begun writing their lists to Santa and the TV and radio are now dominated by adverts for festive shopping opportunities, activities and eateries.

In our house, like many of yours I’m sure, Christmas is a big deal.  Planning for Christmas starts weeks, or perhaps even months in advance.  We’ve been buying little gifts since the beginning of October and gradually stockpiling ideas for the Christmas menu.  Come December, we will sit around with our cookbooks and begin looking up this year’s recipes.  By Christmas week we will have placed our orders with our chosen supermarkets and food suppliers, we’ll have wrapped our gifts, sauces and stuffings will be made and there’ll be a plan in place for what needs to go into the oven when on the big day.

As we all become expert planners at Christmas, this week we thought we would devise some key tips and ideas you can use to help you with planning in your business.  Here's the first for you now:

Reflect and evaluate your past before planning for the future:

No one ever says, “Remember that thing we did last year that ruined Christmas? Let’s do that again this year!”  People remember the recipe that everyone loved, the present that made the kids so happy, the traditions of putting a plate of mince pies out for Santa and a carrot for Rudolf and how exciting it made going to bed the night before Christmas and then they try to replicate and even improve on that success every year.  The same is true for planning in your business.  Reflect on what has gone well and evaluate why it worked, how the success can be replicated and how it can be improved upon and then commence your planning for the future.

One of the first things we recommend to all of our clients is to attend our 90 day planning workshops as this gives the formal time and setting for planning for their businesses and our next planning event is just around the corner.  For more info, visit the events page on our website:

www.momentumperformancecoaching.com

Catch our next tip on Sunday!

Mastery

Following on from last week’s blog on practice, today I want to discuss the concept of Mastery.  Mastery is something we all strive for in our given area of expertise and it is often seen as difficult to attain, but what exactly is Mastery? In real terms, Mastery is simply having a comprehensive knowledge or skill in a specific area.  The concept may well be simple, but the achievement of Mastery is far from it and even those who others might perceive as having arrived at a masterful status, often don’t see themselves as masters of their chosen field, skill, profession and so on.  The question I want to pose this week is how do those who have achieved Mastery do this? 

No one is born an expert. People are often born with talent or a natural aptitude for a certain skill, but no one is ever the complete package without putting in a substantial amount of effort.  Allow me to utilise another sports analogy here; Andy Murray has recently won Wimbledon and now threatens to take the number one spot in the ATP world rankings from rival Novak Djokovic, but up until 2011, he had been failing to meet his potential and struggling to win a Grand Slam tournament, despite being a runner up on more than one occasion.  So how did he go from being a talented planner who never quite achieved success to the current US Open Champion, Wimbledon Champion and an Olympic Gold Medalist?

Well, firstly he changed his coach. In 2011, he partnered up with Ivan Lendl.  He chose an inspirational master of the sport to coach, direct and Mentor him.  Who better than someone who had achieved no less than eight Grand Slam titles of his own could help him to develop his skills, identify areas for improvement and overcome his setbacks?  His coach offers a different perspective, evaluates his game from a better perspective and knows exactly what it takes to achieve greatness.  Beginning his apprenticeship under Lendl would prove to be the first step in achieving Mastery himself. 

Secondly, and in collaboration with his coach, he built around him a perfect team to support him.  Andy Murray is, ultimately, on his own when competing on the tennis court, but off court he is surrounded by an exceptional group of professionals who support him in achieving his goals.  He works with a small team, each with a distinct role; be that fitness conditioning, physiotherapy, coaching or sports psychology. He has worked hard to establish this team and has had to make some difficult decisions in letting go team members that were not quite the right fit, but having done so, each cog in the Murray machine now completes its job effectively and so ensures success.

Finally, he never stops practicing.  As we determined last week, this is the crucial intentional and reflective practice undertaken when you set out to improve your skills, not the habitual routine practice that doesn’t get you anywhere.  Murray reviews each match with his team, identifies areas for improvement and then sets about practicing for improvement.  Those people who are the best in the world at what they do are so because they know that you never stop learning and improving and that you must practice every day in order to retain Mastery once it has been achieved.

Three things have enabled Murray to achieve Mastery; practice, the right team and an excellent coach.

The same three things can enable you to achieve Mastery in your business, so ask yourself these questions; how often do you practice? What skills could you improve with more practice? Do you have the right team? Where does your feedback come from?  Do you receive any coaching? Do you give your employees or even your customers the opportunity to coach you on how to improve your business?  Is it time you thought about getting your own Ivan Lendl and appointed a business coach?

Thoughts

“All coaching is, is taking a player where he can't take himself.”
Bill McCartney

“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.”
Michelangelo 

"Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect."
Vince Lombardi  

Planning Events

Another busy week here at Momentum; we truly believe you should practice what you preach, so as well as preparing for our own forthcoming planning day, we’re also going to attend a planning day event with our own coach.  People are occasionally surprised to hear that we too use a coach, but when you work IN a business every day, it is crucial that you remember to carve out the much needed time to work ON the business.  It’s also an opportunity to have someone outside the business challenge you and push you further than you would necessarily be able to push yourself.  I’m a business owner too and, as someone who advocates the benefits of coaching to my own clients, it would be pretty obscure if I didn’t seek the benefits for myself!

Planning days are a great opportunity to meet with other success minded business owners and work on in-building strategies to build profits, better manage time, improve leadership skills and create a 90 day plan.  This is what we will work on with our coach and what we work on with our clients too.  As coaches, we get to work with some fantastic people.  We love to work with business owners who are passionate and serious about their businesses and those people who are interested in learning new ideas and seeing their business from different perspectives in order to build their success.  There really is nothing more rewarding than meeting a business owner who is not getting what they want from their business and being able to offer them the opportunity to change this.

On some of our promotional materials we use a quote from Alan Lakein, “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”  Whenever we attend and hold a planning event like this, I think of this quotation.  We’re all very good at thinking about our futures as some long off, distant place where all our lofty dreams and aspirations could come to fruition, but if we don’t plan for how this could be a reality, how can we actually expect it to happen? 

Planning in business (and in life) is such a powerful tool.  I’m looking forward to making our own plans for the future this week and helping our clients plan for their futures too.

If you’d like more information on a planning day event with us, feel free to contact us.

Growing Your Profit, Transforming Your Business, Changing Lives

www.mpcforprofit.com  info@mpcforprofit.com

Telephone  0151 348 1212