So what are the right questions to ask yourself when you are in the process of either starting or expanding your business (or any important project, for that matter)?

Here are two questions for you to consider:

Based both on your particular genius (or skill set), what is your best strategy for serving your ideal clients and expanding your income?

There are so many ways that one can seek to make a profit, especially in this digital age.

If you are a coach, then there is private coaching, group coaching, webinars, online courses, workshops, VIP days. The list can go on and on.

If you create products, then it’s painfully easy to keep switching back and forth among various products, instead of focusing on one product from beginning to end.

For those of us afflicted with S.O.S. (Shiny Object Syndrome), it is very tempting to flit between one option and another and never truly focus on the one that can actually serve people and build our business.

The answer to the first question, then, is to pick your best strategy and stick with it, despite all the distractions that come along to lure you into failure.

Which brings us to the second question:

What is the single most important thing you can do today to move your business forward?

Once you have chosen to focus on one strategy, the challenge becomes how to best focus your time: This is vitally important for three reasons:

1. It empowers you to avoid the inevitable enticements that come your way.
2. By focusing on the one most important thing you can do today to move your business forward, you will in fact be moving your business forward. (DUH!)
3. You get to use the inertia of motion (things in motion tend to stay in motion) to your advantage.

Once you have done that one most important thing, it becomes easier to do another important thing. Before you know it, you could get a lot more done than you thought possible, simply because you got off your duff and got started.

I invite you to spend some time pondering the answer to the first question; and once you have answered it, to ask the second question daily. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

In the meanwhile, click here for more strategies on achieving your goals.

The post 2 Questions that Can Accelerate Your Business Growth appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

Actually abject terror as a motivator is pretty limiting. A serious health issue such as a mild heart attack or the discovery of a spot on one’s lungs is often enough to scare people into striving to eliminate bad habits out of fear of dying too soon.

Mounting expenses and credit card debt can provide powerful motivation for figuring out a better way to build a sustainable income.

Yet terror alone is often short-lived. One needs a much more positive motivator to keep on choosing different actions that enable one to reach worthy goals.

So to balance out short-term terror as a motivator, I am adding a new motto to my collection: Nothing beats profound love as an enduring motivator.

It takes a deep and abiding love, both for ourselves and for those who would be badly affected by our poor choices, to keep on the road to change.

After all, it has been said that the only one who truly welcomes change is a wet baby.

Love as a motivator applies not only to our personal choices, but to those we make in business as well.

If our business goals include serving those who need our gifts, as well as creating the income and lifestyle of our dreams; then it’s vital to care deeply about those whom we are meant to serve, as well as to truly desire the life that success in our business will enable us to live.

I invite you to look at your goals for yourself, your business, and for your future from two points of view:

1. What do you deeply desire to create in your life and in your business?
2. What do you fervently wish to avoid allowing to happen in your life and in your business?

It’s a two-sided look at assessing your WHY, taking advantage of dual aspects of our human nature – seeking joy and avoiding pain.

Perhaps you will find the combination of assessments helpful in enabling you to reach your own cherished goals. I certainly hope so!

The post Have You Thought about Your WHY Lately? appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

You know the drill!

You create a hopeful, and often long, list of things you would like to do better in the coming year.

Losing weight and exercising more seem to be perennial favorites, along with making more money and spending more time with loved ones.

That list ends up in a drawer somewhere, and then gets thrown out when you come across it several months later.

It is just another way we humans find to make ourselves feel badly and disappointed in ourselves.

What if there were a better way?

I would like to propose that, instead of making a list of resolutions, you make a list of decisions.

What is truly important to you to accomplish, or for longer term goals, start accomplishing this year?

Inspiration plays a key role is this process as well.

If the decisions you make are to last beyond the heat of the moment when you make them, take the time to sit down and write a list of why these particular decisions are meaningful to you, and how they will enhance your life, and the lives of other people as well.

But remember this fundamental law!

Nothing gets done until you set aside time in your calendar to actually do the right things at the right time.

One of the people who really knew how to get things done was the late Dwight D Eisenhower, not only as the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II, but then later as the 34th President of the United States of America.

In fact, we are all indebted to Dwight Eisenhower for using his time as president to push for the creation of the inter-state highway system in the United States.

During the war, he had seen how undue dependence on railways was a defensive danger, since bombing rail lines was an easy way to cut off the critical movement of people and goods during wartime.

Click here to check out his Urgent/Important Principle.

If that information seems somewhat familiar to you, it’s because Stephen R. Covey included it in his landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

So setting aside time for the consequential items that aren’t urgent is an indispensable key to reaching many of the underlying and substantive goals in your life.

THREE DECISIONS TO CONSIDER:

1. Is one of your decisions to stop keeping yourself and your results small, either because you are not sure what to say in various situations, or how to put it across in a compelling manner, or because you are simply too nervous or scared to speak up in public?
2. Have you come to the conclusion that now is finally the time to learn more effective ways to communicate with people in various situations?
3. Do you have the sneaking suspicion that I might possibly be the right person to help you achieve your communication goals?

If so, here are two options for you to consider:

• THE SLOW BUT STEADY OPTION:  The VVP Academy is my private membership community that is chock full of resources that are available to you 24/7. Here’s the link to check it out: https://vibrantvocalpower.com/academy
• THE DEEP DIVE OPTION:  Private one-on-one mentoring with me is your unique path, designed to enable you to achieve your particular communication goals as efficiently and as effectively as possible. More information is available at this link: http://meetwithmarjorie.com/

Whatever you decide to accomplish this brave new year, here’s wishing you every success in using your decision making power to create your best year yet.

The post Is It Possible to Create More Effective New Year’s Resolutions? appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

The challenge comes in moving beyond the inspiration of the moment through the long road to eventual accomplishment of that initial exciting idea.

Far too many inspirational ideas seem to end up in the graveyard of dead dreams.

Not only is this a loss to the world, it is a personal and often painful loss to the person who dreamt the dream.

Here are some possible strategies to create a viable path from inspiration to accomplishment.

1. Get really, really, really clear on what your idea actually is. You need to be able to write it down in words that resonate with the power of your dream.
2. Run your idea by some trusted advisers. Be sure to avoid Sally Sniper and Larry Lack-of-Vision. They will surely rain on your parade. However, sharing your idea with another open-minded and adventurous person has the advantage of requiring you to clarify what you are really about. This is a sure test of the intelligibility, or lack thereof, of your vision.
3. List the resources necessary to start on the path of bringing your idea into reality. Consider first of all the three biggest items: time, money and human resources. Once you have done that, multiply all of your numbers by at least 2 or 3 to get a more realistic idea of what is really needed.
4. List the possible obstacles in your path that you will need to take into consideration as you move ahead.
5. Ask yourself these difficult, yet vitally important questions:
   • What limiting beliefs might stop me from achieving my goals?
   • I there something about my habits or my mindset that might be getting in my way?

One crucial element in bringing your inspiration to fruition is being able to powerfully and effectively communicate it to the people whose help you need, to prospective financial backers, as well as to potential team members, clients or customers.

If you find yourself in situations where you are not sure what to say, or how to say it effectively, or you are simply afraid to say it; this is a sure-fire recipe for keeping you and your results small.

You cannot succeed when you keep ideas and your inspiration secret from the world.

One place to find a wealth of resources is my communication confidence community, VVP Academy.

Click this link to check out all the value your will receive as a member. Charter memberships are still available.

I plan to share other practical strategies for actualizing your inspirations in next week’s blog post.

Please share in the comments if the ideas I’ve shared make sense to you.

The post Can You Get from Inspiration to Accomplishment? Part I appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

This does not mean that you should not feel free to set outrageous, impossible dream types of goals for yourself if you wish to do so. You just need better strategies in order to accomplish them.

STRATEGY #1 – Create a Ladder of Goals

What do I mean by a ladder of goals? Simply put, it’s a series of smaller, more doable goals that move steadily in the direction of the ultimate goal.

The old riddle asks, How to you eat an elephant? The answer: One bite at a time.

So take your elephant sized goal and divide it into small bites, each of which stretches you just enough to provide the right sized challenge you need to move yourself forward, without dumping you into procrastination mode.

STRATEGY #2 – Appreciate What You Accomplish Each Step of the Way

Too often we fail to give ourselves adequate credit for our progress forward.

Even more importantly, we do not acknowledge efforts that do not turn out as we had hoped. Instead, we judge ourselves harshly, and thus fail to discover the gift hidden in every so-called failure along the way.

It is far better to celebrate every step along the path, and thus give ourselves the incentive and encouragement to climb the next rung of the ladder.

STRATEGY #3 – Cultivate Patience

Since we live in what a good friend of mine calls Instant America, this may be the hardest thing of all for us to do.

Yet every major accomplishment requires a long period of gestation and work.

Think about how top level athletes in your favorite sports perform at the Olympics..

As awesome as the performances of the athletes are; far more awesome are the years of coaching, hard work, and practice that enable them to reach the pinnacle of their particular sport.

So if you have an Olympic sized goal in mind and truly wish to achieve it, you will be much more likely to attain it if you view it with the perspective and dedication of those who go for the gold.

As the famously successful football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.

The post 3 Strategies for Achieving Your Outrageous Goals appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

They are admirable because they enable us to set our sights upon something worthwhile that can bring value both to ourselves and to others.

All great accomplishments come as the result of striving toward targets that are initially beyond the reach of those who set goals for themselves and/or for their organizations.

Goals are also tricky because it is frightfully easy to set ones that are either too easy, or those that are simply impossible to pull off.

Goals that are too easy are generally already within our comfort zone. They do not require us to expand our skills or our human potential.

While some of these easy goals are a necessary part of ordinary life (such as getting up at a certain time every day), they bring neither fulfillment nor excitement to our days.

Goals that are impossible carry the opposite risk. They are so far beyond our comfort zone that it is tempting to not even get started on them.

They are a breeding ground for procrastination and disappointment in ourselves for our failure to get a move on.

So the trick in setting goals is to find the sweet spot between too easy on the one hand, and impossible on the other.

Look for goals that fulfill the following criteria:

1. They are important to you.
2. You are excited about achieving them.
3. They require you to expand your skills.
4. You know that you will grow as a person when working on them.
5. They are goals that you can take justifiable pride in achieving.
6. They will make your life and your world a better place to live in.

One last thought, though, about goals that I described as impossible. People do in fact achieve seemingly impossible goals.

As the late David Ben Gurion, first prime minister of the State of Israel, famously said, If you don’t believe in miracles, you are not a realist.

Another quote of his that seems to apply to this discussion is, If an expert says it can’t be done, get another expert.

And Albert Einstein shared another take on what is seemingly impossible to accomplish:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Do you have a cherished goal that has been spending too much time on the back burner?

Are you open to polishing it up to see if now is the time to let it shine?

The post 2 Reasons Why Setting Goals Can Be Tricky appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

It is not as if I had never read Steven R. Covey’s book on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, in which he delineates four types of activities:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important and Not Urgent
3. Unimportant and Urgent
4. Unimportant and Not Urgent

He goes on to observe that we spend far too much time on the unimportant and urgent, and fail to set aside specific time for the important and not urgent.

For me at least, the important items can often come with a negative emotional charge, some type of fear that is blocking me from taking action.

The end result is that I waste precious time keeping busy doing the unimportant stuff in order to avoid taking action and doing the important stuff.

It is a form of self-sabotage. As my wise friend, Michelle Fought, points out, Sabotage is a block to our greatness.

When you are planning your schedule of activities for each day, I invite you to do as I plan to do for myself.

Look at every item on the list and ask yourself this important question:

Where you are keeping busy instead of taking action on the important, but not necessarily urgent items on your to-do list?

It is past time to kick self-sabotage to the curb, and to allow our greatness to unfold and benefit not only ourselves, but the world around us.

P.S. I cannot remember if Steven R. Covey gave proper attribution for this matrix in his book. You can find more information about the original source on this site.

The post Are You Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic? appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

When we start talking about the issue of money in regard to any purchase, and we are on the buying side of the table, we view the money issue as a decision.

However, when we are on the selling side of the table and the money issue arises, it often metamorphoses into the mentally and emotionally challenging category of an objection.

All the questions that we consider to be legitimate concerns when we are buying suddenly loom as major obstacles to enrolling potential clients or selling a valuable product.

How much does it cost? and I cannot afford it become stumbling blocks that leave us fumbling for words. The whole process of offering our service to someone can end up lurching to an ungainly halt when we hit the money roadblock.

Three negative outcomes can result from our failure to handle the money issue effectively:

1. People who may truly need our service or product do not get to enjoy the benefits that they may desperately need.
2. We have the sinking feeling that we have failed someone whom we could help.
3. We fall short of building our business to the level it has the potential to reach.

The reality is that if we do not have a strategy in place to handle the money issue, we end up suffering from brain freeze. This definitely detracts from our authority and expert status, and greatly reduces our chances for serving people who need us and for creating business success.

If you sometimes suffer from money issue brain freeze, here are a few things to consider, both to improve your results, and also to enable you to serve those whom you are meant to serve.

1. In conversing with potential clients, do you do a good enough job of eliciting each person’s goals and dreams?
2. Do you help people to gain clarity on the challenges they are facing and on the negative impact these challenges have on what they wish to achieve?
3. Do you make it possible for them to get in touch with how much better their life would be if they could overcome their challenges and reach their goals?

As much as we like to think that we are primarily rational beings, the truth is that we humans make decisions for emotional reasons. Only then do we use our thinking brain to find rational reasons for the emotional decision that we have just made.

Unless people truly get in touch with the exorbitant cost of their current challenges in preventing them from reaching their goals and dreams; the money issue will continue to loom large, both for them and for us.

The post When Does a Decision Become an Objection? appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

We also have freedom of religion (or no religion), freedom to choose our profession or to start a business; and freedom to set our own goals and to live pretty much according to our own preferences.

The inescapable corollary of the freedom to make choices is that those choices inevitably require us to make decisions if we are to have any hope of living a life of meaning and value.

Somehow the word choice is a lot more appealing to us than the word decision. Choice is a word that expresses the joy of freedom; while decision carries with it the burden of responsibility.

What if we make a wrong decision? That fear sometimes prevents us from making any decision at all (which, of course, is also a decision).

The reality is that sometime or another, we are going to make some decisions that do not create the results we had hoped they would. Periodically making the wrong decision is the price we pay for the blessing of having freedom of choice.

This brings us to a vitally important decision: how we choose to respond when we make a bad decision.

Unfortunately, the four most difficult words to pronounce in the English language often seem to be I made a mistake. We live in a society that has made an art of the blame game. But as my sister Marsha wisely observes: When you point one finger at someone else, there are three more fingers pointing back at you.

Admitting when we make a mistake is not only the mature path to take; it is also the surest path to forgiveness from anyone who may have been affected negatively by our mistake. (This is especially true since so few people seem to be able to admit to making a mistake.)

From a more positive and hopeful perspective, it is my firm belief that every mistake has in it an important lesson for us to learn, if only we can stop beating up on ourselves for making it in the first place.

Instead of viewing a particular decision as a mistake, it is much more powerful to view it as giving us the opportunity to either figure out a way to improve what we were working on or eliminate something that does not work. Then we are free to try something else in its place; because, at the end of the day, the only true failure is giving up.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to forgive ourselves for being human. Since we do not currently live in a messianic age, expecting perfection of ourselves is not only unrealistic and counter-productive, it is painful to live with the negative self-talk that is a common result of perfectionism.

It is far better to heed the hard-won wisdom of a woman who has led a famously difficult life, and who has obviously come to some kind of peace with her human condition. We are not meant to be perfect; we are meant to be whole, Jane Fonda.

The post OOPS! What Do You Do When You Make a Wrong Decision? appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.

What? More decisions? When we tackled what I call the hardest one, weren’t we done with them already? No such luck!

Just when I thought that we were indeed done with decisions, at least a couple more popped into my unwilling brain.

Here is one that can easily be categorized as the trickiest one.

After you have decided that doing some particular thing:

1. Is in your best long term interest;
2. Is worth the investment of both your time and money;
3. Is important enough to come to peace about it with your partner (if you have one);
4. And that you really can do this;

then another even trickier decision can show up and bite you in the tush.

This is actually an on-going decision. Once you do decide to take on something new, excitement and enthusiasm play a tremendous role in enabling you to get off to a strong start.

However, once you get into the reality of the nitty gritty of the work, and once you start running into the inevitable glitches that occur with any on-going project, that’s when you are confronted with this trickiest of decisions. Do you keep fishing or cut line?

Two quotes may prove inspirational whenever you run into this tricky decision.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge

The art of commitment should really be called the art of re-commitment. Commitment gets you started and propels you through the early stages of any game, but it’s re-commitment that ignites your reserves when you feel like you’re going to give up. Those moments of low energy are inevitable (in my experience, at least) when you’re on the quest for any worthy goal. The saving move in that moment is to renew your commitment.
Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap

Therefore the process is to first clarify and commit to your worthy goal, and then to decide to persevere and recommit to it, as often as necessary, in order to reach the objective you have set for yourself.

Reaching such a worthy objective is a vital component to enable you to enjoy a life of accomplishment and fulfillment.

So I’m curious. Do you agree that keeping a long term commitment to a big goal you have set for yourself is a tricky decision to have to make and then have to remake?

The post Decision #5 – The Trickiest One appeared first on Vibrant Vocal Power.