This is not a resolution, it’s an ALL OUT resolve!

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Whatever your age, you’ve made resolutions, you’ve made goals, and often fall short of the stated objective, desire and/or objective.

Drop resolutions, they’re always painful.
Drop goals, they’re often unmet.

Refer to whatever it is that you want as: “my intended and expected achievement” and add a few lines about your intentions and desires. Your outcome.

Not just what the expected achievement is, but how you intend to make it happen.

Not just focus, but genuine drive and the allocation of time to make it happen.

Whether it’s lose 10 (or 20) pounds, make 10 sales a month, or be a better dad, there has to be something specific that tells WHAT you want. HOW you plan to make it your reality. And WHEN you believe it will become reality.

There are fundamentals to follow. But the secret to achievement of what you call goals and resolutions, are the unspoken aspects of your process and your present situation BEFORE you begin the achievement process:

  • Happy about yourself.
  • Happy about your life.
  • Happy about your relationships.
  • Proud of what you’re doing.
  • Love of what you’re doing.
  • Love who you’re doing it with.
  • Desire to be the BEST at what you’re doing.
  • Purpose behind what you’re doing (your REAL WHY).

Here are a few things to consider as you look to “put” HAPPINESS, and “be” HAPPY in the new year.

IDEA: Maybe if I tell you SOME of the things I plan to do, it will inspire you to do more than you were thinking, and in a different way. Here are my objectives for the first 100 days of 2016. Not all will be completed in that timeframe, but all will be implemented and in full motion.

  • All out sales campaign. Contact every customer we have ever done business with – offer them help, ask them where the most help is needed, and ask them for more business. I have a year long series of webinars planned (jeffreygitomer.com/gold)
  • All out improvement of customer service. Faster shipping, faster turnaround of training modules, faster response to needs and questions, and memorable recovery for the rare mistakes we make. More proactive customer communications – thank you’s and confirmations for your order. Every day.
  • All out branding. My writing, column, my ezine, my website, my podcasts, and all my promotions will reflect the value that my customer relates to, and wants more of. New ideas and names like “Gitomer Gold” and “The Year of The Sale.”
  • All out relationship building. “Value first” is the key. I have been successful with that philosophy for 25 years. Consistent communication is the secret. Increase the value of my website, gitomer.com, and my 14 year old weekly ezine, Sales Caffeine.
  • All out internal education with a focus on attitude and trust. This shoemaker’s daughter will wear shoes FIRST. In order to offer the best of everything, my team (actually my family) will have to be their best. I have hundreds of hours of sales, customer loyalty, attitude, trust, and personal development training available, (GitomerLearningAcademy.com) and my inside team will be the first to take advantage of it.
  • All out better student. Read more. Study the history of sales and personal development more. Write more philosophical discoveries and understandings.
  • All out work my hardest. I will complete three books this year. I will give less presentations (they only last a day) and devote more time to writing and recording (it lasts a lifetime). I will make certain all my content, whether online, in books or in seminars, is the most relevant, real-world, and transferable as I am physically and mentally able.
  • All out work my best. Own my time. Invest my time. Be more organized and more productive in my early hours of the day.
  • All out be my best. Increase focus on personal health and excellence, both physical and mental, both at work, and at home. Be the best dad, the best granddad, the best friend, the best boss, the best person I can be.

The key words are “all out.”

This is not a time for waiting. This is a time for DOING.

What are you going to be DOING all out?

What are you going “all out” to achieve this year?

And what does “all out” mean to you?

IS THIS YOU?: Most people at this time of year write down a few namby-pamby resolutions or goals. Lose ten pounds, read more books, exercise more, join a health club, keep a clean desk, and other dead-end wishes that will fade in less than a month. Don’t let this be you – especially this year.

Why not add “all out” to whatever you write down so that you are determined to take some real action, and commit to an all out effort to achieve for yourself? Seems pretty simple – challenge yourself to become better, and in some cases, become best.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey GitomerJeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

Practices for Professionals – Meetings: The Purpose of Holding Meetings

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StrategyDriven Professional Meeting PrincipleBusiness professionals commonly attend multiple meetings each day. While consuming a significant portion of the individual’s time, these meetings seldom provide an adequate return on investment for the participant or meeting sponsor.

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Training vs. Learning: Do you want to train? Or have someone learn?

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Training successfully educates only those who are predisposed to the new material. Others may endeavor to learn during class but may not permanently adopt it. The problem isn’t the value of information or the eagerness of the learner: It’s a problem with both the training model itself and the way learners learn. It’s a systems/change problem.

How We Learn

We all operate out of unique, internal systems comprised of mental models (rules, beliefs, history etc.) that form the foundation of who we are and determine our choices, behaviors and habits. Our behaviors are the vehicles that represent these internal systems – our beliefs in action, if you will. So as a Buddhist I wouldn’t learn to shoot a gun, but if someone were to try to kill my family I’d shift the hierarchy of my beliefs to put ‘family’ above ‘Buddhist’ and ‘shooting a gun’ might be within the realm of possibility.

Because anything new is a threat to our habitual and carefully (unconsciously) organized internal system (part of our limbic brain), we instinctively defend ourselves against anything ‘foreign’ that might seek to enter. For real change (like learning something new) to occur, our system must buy-in to the new or it will be automatically resisted. It similarly effects selling/buying, coaching/clients, doctors/patients, leaders/followers.

A training program potentially generates obstacles, such as when

  • learners are happy with their habitual behaviors and don’t seek anything new,
  • fear they might lose their historic competency,
  • the new material unconsciously opposes long-held beliefs.

We are programmed to maintain our status quo and resist anything new unless our beliefs/mental models recognize that the new material will align with our status quo regardless of the efficacy of the required change.

How We Train

The training model assumes that if new material

  • is recognized as important, rational, and useful,
  • is offered in a logical, informative, interesting way,
  • allows time for experience and practice,

it will become accepted and habituated. But these assumptions are faulty. At an unconscious level, this model attempts to push something foreign into a closed system (our status quo): it might be adopted briefly, but if it opposes our habituated norm, it will show up as a threat and be resisted. This is the same problem faced when sellers attempt to place a new solution, or doctors attempt to change the habits of ill patients. It has little to do with the new, and everything to do with change management.

Truly experiential learning has a higher probability of being adopted because it uses the experience – like walking on coals, doing trust-falls with team members – to shift the underlying beliefs where the change takes place. Until or unless there is a belief change, and the underlying system is ready, willing, and able to adopt the new material into the accepted status quo, the change will not be permanent.

One of the unfortunate assumptions of the training field is that the teach/experience/practice model is effective and if learning doesn’t take place it’s the fault of the learner (much like sellers think the buyer is the problem, coaches thinks clients are the problem, and Listeners think Speakers are the problem). Effective training must change beliefs first.

Learning Facilitation

To avoid resistance and support adoption, training must enable

  1. buy-in from the belief/system status;
  2. the system to discover its own areas of lack and create an acceptable opening for change

before the new material is offered.

I had a problem to resolve when designing my first Buying Facilitation® training program in 1983. Because my content ran counter to an industry norm (sales), I had to help learners overcome a set of standardized beliefs and accepted processes endemic to the field. Learners would have to first recognize that their habitual skills were insufficient and higher success ratios were possible by adding (not necessarily subtracting) new ones. I called my training design Learning Facilitation and have used this model successfully for decades. (See my paper in The 2003 Annual: Volume 1 Training [Jossey-Bass/Pfieffer]: “Designing Curricula for Learning Environments Using a Facilitative Teaching Approach to Empower Learners” pp 263-272).

Briefly: Day 1 helps learners recognize the components of their unconscious status quo while identifying skills necessary for greater excellence: specifically, what they do that works and what they do that doesn’t work, and how their current skills match up with their unique definition of excellence within the course parameters. Day 2 enables learners to identify skills that would supplement their current skills to choose excellence at will, and tests for, and manages, acceptance and resistance. Only then do new behaviors get introduced and practiced.

Course material is designed with ‘learning’ in mind (rather than content sharing/behavior change), and looks quite different from conventional training. For example Day 1 uses no desks, no notes, and no lectures. I teach learners how to enlist their unconscious to facilitate buy-in for new material.

Whether it’s my training model or your own, just ask yourself: Do you want to train? Or have someone learn? They are two different activities.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is a visionary, original thinker, and thought leader in change management and decision facilitation. She works as a coach, trainer, speaker, and consultant, and has authored 9 books including the NYTimes Business BestsellerSelling with Integrity. Morgen developed the Buying Facilitation® method (www.sharondrewmorgen.com) in 1985 to facilitate change decisions, notably to help buyers buy and help leaders and coaches affect permanent change. Her newest book What? www.didihearyou.com explains how to close the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She can be reached at [email protected]

What Is Beyond Control? New Ways For Benevolent Leaders To Innovate.

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership ArticleMillennials and younger generations don’t respond to control and a non-stop focus on productivity. To get the best out of them you need to be a benevolent leader. What is different about being a benevolent leader? You are always in the question of what you are creating and how it can contribute to everyone, not just your bottom line. Benevolent leadership is innovation on steroids. By its very nature, innovation goes beyond control.

If innovation is a core strategy for your business, you need to lead from the space of asking questions that create new possibilities and new choices. You can’t control the outcomes. You can control the questions you ask. Traditional management schools teach you to ask the questions you know the answers to. Benevolent leaders know this won’t create innovation and expansion. To be continually thriving rather than just surviving you have to ask the questions that don’t have an obvious ‘right’ answer!

What do these questions look like? Let’s start with what they don’t look like! If you are hearing things like this come out of your mouth or your meetings, you are limiting what you can create in your business:

  • “How do we make people work harder?”
  • “How can we control our projects more closely?”
  • “Why isn’t this working?”

Let’s consider some different possibilities.

Instead of asking how you can make people work harder, ask, “What can our people contribute that we have not yet considered?” and then ask them what they would like to contribute. Have you ever noticed how much more people will do when it is their choice?

Instead of asking how to control your projects better, ask, “What possibilities are available here that we have not yet considered?” Most projects are created in a linear and logical way. What if there is a faster, easier, more joyful way? Would you be willing to have that instead? If you ask your team, “What strategies can create the greatest results for the least effort?” you invite the elegance of creation, rather than the insanity of complicated solutions and non-stop stress. Deadlines can be met in half the time if you ask the questions that will create new possibilities!

Instead of asking why something isn’t working, ask, “What else can we create or generate that would out-create this situation?” Out-creation invites new possibilities and choices. Fixing problems invites more problems. This is the question to ask if you find you have a new problem to solve every time you turn around. What if your value as a benevolent leader is in what you create, rather than what you fix or control?

Are you willing to be the leader that people turn to, not because you have the right answers, but because the questions you ask always create greater possibilities?

What if you could be rewarded for your awareness of possibilities, rather than your ability to limit what is possible? That is the choice that you make as a benevolent leader. Are you willing to invite more possibilities than other people and businesses do? You have the choice. Ask the questions that take you out of the limitations of control and into the non-stop creation of innovation. That is how you create a sustainable future – for you, your organization and the world.

About the Author
Gary DouglasBusiness innovator, investor, author, antique storeowner and breeder of Costa Rican horses, Gary Douglas lives life to the fullest. He is the founder of Access Consciousness®, a personal development modality that has helped thousands worldwide by giving them tools to create change in all aspects of life – from addiction, recovery, weight loss, business, money, health, relationships and creativity. The Access tools are now offered in 173 countries. In 2010 his book The Place became a Barnes and Nobles #1 Bestseller. Gary is regularly featured in the international media as a thought leader in business. Find Gary at GaryMDouglas.com and Access Consciousness at AccessConsciousness.com.

Why Efficiency in Your Personal Life Matters

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Have you ever had a day where you go to bed saying to yourself, “I worked so hard, but I didn’t get anything done?” I hate when that happens, whether it be at work or at home. In this scattered culture, it is increasingly easy to lose focus on the most important things in life. There are two primary strategies I can credit for giving me a giant boost in my daily productivity.

The first strategy is called Difference-Making Actions (DMA’s). DMA’s give focus and intentionality to the most important things every day – at work or at home. This simple strategy can increase results like nothing else. Here’s how it works: First thing every morning, take a sticky note and write your most important current goal. (A note on a smart phone works too.) Then write the numbers 1-5 down the page. Next to the 1, write the most important thing you could do today to accomplish that goal. Then write the next most important thing under 2, and so on. When you are done, you have identified the five most important things you could do that day to accomplish your most important goal. To be successful, DMA’s have a number attached to them. For example, “clean the garage for two hours” or “plan and prepare four meals.”

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About the Author

David HorsagerDavid Horsager, MA, CSP, is a business strategist, entrepreneur, and author of the national bestseller The Trust Edge, and the new book The Daily Edge: Simple Strategies to Increase Efficiency and Make an Impact Every Day. For more information, please visit www.DavidHorsager.com.