Month: June 2023 (Page 2 of 4)

It would seem that the simpler is the better choice.

Whether we are streamlining our daily tasks and/or the amount of projects we have in our quiver, distilling it down to the essentials is key.

This can be a challenge as we want to accomplish so many things in a day/week/month/year. However, we can become disillusioned with being busy, but not getting real traction with anything.

Weeding out the superfluous may be just the ticket for us.

Deciding what is truly important for us to fully engage our time and efforts in can make all the difference.

In addition, we may find that these activities energize us instead of depleting our batteries.

Sounds perfect.

Maybe more is not necessarily better, but rather the quality of what is already there.

Maybe faster is not the answer, but rather what we learn along the way.

Maybe instead of always trying to have the right answer, we should determine if we’re asking the right questions.

Maybe instead of repeating our story to everyone and bragging about what we know, we should be asking more questions.

Maybe we should paddle upstream instead of down.

Maybe we should ask why?

Or at what cost?

Maybe we can embrace our individuality and be curious instead of being right.

Although I wouldn’t say it while it’s going down and I’m in the moment, but after it’s all said and done, I’m sure It’s a blessing.

The fact that I have to find a way to drum up more business because we’re in a bit of a slump in sales and refine my selling technique, justify my pricing and find additional benefits to our product is probably a blessing. Even though it takes more time and effort.

Ultimately, whatever we go through in our lives is not as important as how we react to what happens to us.

We can choose to play the victim, blame circumstances and shirk responsibility or we can chalk it us as a blessing and move forward.

The choice is always ours to make.

I just heard this wonderful advice in regards to having conversations with others whether it’s for business or personal. I’m not quite sure of its’ orgin, but it’s inline with the basic rules of improvisation. It’s called, “yes and.”

I like it for more than one reason. It’s not negative and doesn’t discount what another person is saying, but adds to the conversation and directs it accordingly.

In improv, when someone establishes some sort of fact by stating it – “Why is your head so large?” You cannot say, “It’s not.” You have to accept it as fact and build on it. Maybe saying something like, “Yeah, and it’s really hard finding a hat that will fit properly.”

But, what if you brought that to the business world. Maybe it would sound something like this: “We can’t fit the cost of your product into our budget because your prices are so high.” The response could be: “Yes, and that’s because the quality of material we use along with the finished product is so much better than 90% of similar products. Because of that, our outlast the competition by 3X.”

Rather than negating what they said about your product, you build on it and address their statement directly.

It seems like a much less cryptic business strategy with respect and directness built into it.

I would think everyone would appreciate that.

There are many things we don’t have a choice about in life. Our height. Color of our eyes or the family we were brought into. But, we do have choices on how we design our lives. From the people we choose to spend our time with, to how we view the world to the way we talk to ourselves and other people.

And although we may feel like we’re victims of circumstances, often these are the results of our choices we’ve made in the past. Whether that is choosing to smoke cigarettes and now our health has diminished 30+ years later or choosing not clear up our past years of resentment that we continue to hold onto in the present day keeping us locked into the past unable to move forward.

WE are the designers of our lives. Only us. Of course we will always be dealing with circumstances that our beyond our control, but when we’re able to focus on our business at hand, by designing the life we long to live and show up daily doing the work, odds are, we’ll be much closer to the life we’ve designed than not.