Business Skills

What Is Your Very Most Important Business Message?

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What’s the very most important message to share effectively in your business, the one message that makes the difference between either creating conversations that lead to clients, referrals, and cash; or the message that turns people off entirely?

You’ll find my answer in this video. (Hint: It’s how well you answer the What do you do? question.)

Get this one message right and you open the door to opportunity. Get it wrong and that door can slam in your face.

If you would like to feel more confident and authentic when answering that question, and to improve how people respond to you, I invite you to join my fun and free 5-day challenge, Effortless Elevator Pitch, taking place on October 8-12.

Simply click the following link to join in the excitement, while upgrading your message to a whole new level.

http://EffortlessPitch.com

You will be amazed at what you will accomplish in a short amount of time per day for 5 short days.

I look forward to sharing this adventure with you.

Please feel free to share the link for the challenge with those you know who may also want to speak about what they do in a more engaging and effective way. http://EffortlessPitch.com

Another Cure for Overwhelm – Practice the 3 Ds

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It’s amazing what goodies lurk in my article and report collection.

Just when I was feeling overwhelmed and not coming up with a topic to write about this week, I found a gem in my file drawer.

That’s where I keep a file folder labeled Article Ideas, especially for a day like today, when no handy idea pops into my brain to share with you.

What I found is a column that I hadn’t looked at in  years; and by happy coincidence, it deals with the topic of overwhelm.

Written by former Detroit area broadcast journalist Mort Crim, it is entitled: Practice the 3 Ds: Do, delegate, ditch.

To quote Mort directly: When you think about it, every task can be dealt with in one of those three ways.

Either do it, give it to someone else to do, or forget it. No Mr. In-Between.

The only other alternative is to vacillate, allowing the stack of worrisome incompletes in our lives to grow out of control.

Mort concludes by saying, Which ever you choose, just don’t delay it. That ‘D’ is deadly.

Mort’s article brings to mind a brilliant observation by Melissa Klein (scribbled by me at the bottom of Mort’s article):

Each paper is a decision unmade. OUCH! That one sure can hit home!

Since I am an inveterate downloader and copier of great reports that people generously share on the Internet, I have finally come up with a system to handle my addiction to learning as much as I can, whenever I can (also know less admiringly as S.O.S./Shiny Object Syndrome).

That answer is the file drawer to which I referred earlier. I now have folders labeled for all the various topics that relate to my area of expertise and that interest me.

I then make it a practice to spend at least one day a week filing everything that I have collected during the previous week.

This allows me the periodic luxury of wallowing in an ocean of useful information,which is particularly helpful in three ways:

  1. Since I am under no illusion that I know everything about everything, my collection often provides guidance and answers when a client poses a question beyond my current level of knowledge.
  2. In addition to my books, my files are my own personal research library, to which I can turn whenever I am developing a new training, or want to further upgrade a current one.
  3. As an added bonus, my collection enables me to continually upgrade my skills and understanding; so that I can serve my clients at an ever higher level of expertise and effectiveness.

I guess that means you could say that I am an organized hoarder of knowledge.

So no apologies! As far as I am concerned, there are far worse addictions to have than that one!

By any chance, do you also share that same addiction?

Does Your Business Run You? Yet One More Tip to Get Back in Charge

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I had really thought that I had shared all of my thoughts with you about getting back in charge of your business and your life. I wrote about what I thought were the 3 key strategies for getting out of overwhelm and into happy productivity.

  1. Do a Brain Dump by writing down absolutely every little and big task in one gargantuan list.
  2. Go through my Two-Part Priority Assessment System to clarify what jobs take top priority as well as which ones you do well.
  3. And the piece that I thought was the last step in the process: Designing Your Time Bucket Puzzle in order to effectively schedule your days.

But I recently realized that creating an ideal schedule is really just that, an ideal. Real life has a way of disturbing even the best laid plans.

So when your lovely plans for the day get all messed up, how can you respond without beating yourself up and possibly giving up in despair of ever gaining control of your schedule and your life?

Here are some more positive ways of dealing with the inevitable interruptions in life:

  1. Set aside specific times for email and social media (preferably later in the day) so that you don’t fall into their bottomless time pits.
  2. Accept that even if you can’t get everything done that you want to do in a given day, you can always get at least some things done.
  3. You will feel much better about the things you do get done, if you focus on doing the most important things at the beginning of your day, before other stuff gets in your way.
  4. Come to terms with the fact that most jobs tend to take longer than we think they will. My husband Saul is well known in our family for preaching about always leaving yourself what he calls a cushion of time.
  5. If you have taken on a great and worthy cause that you know that you cannot complete yourself, or that perhaps won’t even be completed in your lifetime, console yourself with the wisdom of Rabbi Tarfon, as quoted in The Ethics of the Fathers: It is not your duty to complete the task, nor are you free to desist from it. We can all take pride in doing what we can each day to repair our part of the world, as long as we realize that each little piece we accomplish is an important part of the larger whole.

As an additional suggestion, Saul particularly likes to use the cushion of time strategy when he has an appointment somewhere. It reduces his stress level tremendously to know he has plenty of time to get to his destination.

I personally have found that when I don’t allow myself a cushion of time to drive somewhere, all the drivers ahead of me are driving 10 mph under the speed limit and all of the lights are red.

If you would like to read or reread any of my prior tips about getting back in charge of your business and your life, you can find them on the blog page of my website, http://VibrantVocalPower.com/blog.