Attract more clients with the right message.
It’s a fact of life: Whenever you sit down to write something, you can presume that the audience is in some state of attention deficit.
The person you are trying to reach (that’s you, right now) is multi-tasking in one way or another: monitoring the e-mail coming in through Outlook; maybe taking a call or a text message on the cell phone; keeping an eye on the TV and/or carrying on a conversation with someone else who is actually in the room. Or scrolling through TweetDeck, for crying out loud.
I don’t think so. He had an associate who put in a good word with the Queen, but he didn’t have someone asking him if he was working on the right problem.
Neither (as far as I know) did Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin or Sam Walton. Yet they each pushed themselves to achieve incredible, world-changing feats.
OK, they each had their own special genius.
Guess what? So do you.
I’ve worked for a couple of coaching companies, OneCoach and TEC /Vistage, so I’ve seen how having a business coach in your corner can make a huge difference.
I ran a faster marathon (and achieved one of my life goals) because I had a great coach, pushing me further than I might have gone on my own.
But here’s the thing: You can actually coach yourself.
This is not just me biting the hands that used to feed me. I really believe that while it’d be great to have a Vince Lombardi in your corner, only you can make the commitment to do the things you need to do to get your enterprise (and your life) to the next level.
Sure, new skills, and what they call “out-of-the-box thinking” and are required. But if you’re motivated, you really can transform your business and your life.
Researchers at Oxford University have compiled a list of the top 10 most irritating phrases currently in use. Who knows what methodology they used, but it’s hard to disagree with their findings, even if they reflect the Queen’s English more than the American idiom.
The top ten most irritating phrases:
1 – At the end of the day
2 – Fairly unique
3 – I personally
4 – At this moment in time
5 – With all due respect
6 – Absolutely
7 – It’s a nightmare
8 – Shouldn’t of
Mission statements had value once — they served to get people focused on what the company’s purpose really was, so that everyone could aspire to fulfilling it really well.
Achieving that kind of clarity seemed like a good idea, so pretty soon we were all supposed to create our own individual mission statements, so we could march to our our own well-defined beat and lead more productive, purposeful lives.
Extreme clarity is not for everyone, however, and somewhere along the line, mission statements started getting mushy, full of weasel words that create wiggle room. Today they all seem like they were written by committee and carefully crafted to offend no one — in other words, engineered to be totally meaningless.
We were at Home Depot the other day, picking up a load of bricks for a backyard project. The only manned checkout line in the garden section was four deep, and the guy at the cash register was in no hurry. He actually came out and swept the floor while an elderly woman in front of us tried to figure out how to swipe her credit card. Then a woman came in pushing a cart with a tree-sized plant that she wanted to return.
“Not here,” he told her. She would have to go back outside and push it down to the next entrance, where they handle returns. She wasn’t pleased. He didn’t seem to care. He had a job to do, processing transactions at the checkout. He’d be done at the end of his shift, then he’d go home. At least that’s what it looked like. You can never know for sure what someone’s motives are, but you can see their actions, and his guy didn’t seem particularly interested in helping customers solve problems (and people come to Home Depot only because they have problems to solve).
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