Business Growth Insights

Everyone has times when their memory fails them; suddenly you can’t remember someone’s name, or where you’ve met them or important dates that you should have remembered. But as common as it may be, it can still be frustrating and embarrassing. Numerous books and resources are available to help overcome this annoying malady. Here are 10 of the most popular tips and tricks for improving your memory to help you grow your business.

1. Focus
Being distracted when you are trying to absorb new information is a sure-fire way to never remember what is being said. Pay attention when people are speaking and really focus on what they’re saying.

2. Ask
A good way to remember facts or information that is being relayed to you is to ask questions about it. The more details you gather, the larger the pool of information you’ll have to draw on in your memory.

3. Repeat
If it’s something as simple as a name or date that you want to remember; try repeating to yourself several times. This will help the facts stick in your mind.

4. Convert
Try turning information into a pattern or picture that gives the plain data more impact. For example, maybe you want to remember that your friend Alan’s birthday is on the 8th of the month. You could tell yourself that the A in Alan can be turned into an 8 by adding a few lines. Now you’ve converted the information to something you can remember.

5. Connect
Try to find a connection between new information that you want to remember with something personal.

6. Expand
Learning more about a subject is a good way to make details stick. Just do a quick Internet search of the new information you’ve received to help clarify and define the data in your memory.

7. Visualize
Create a picture in your mind of the thing that you want to remember. Often, the more exaggerated the picture the better. For example, to remember the name Dave you might rhyme it with wave and then picture that person riding a surf board to the office. The next time you pass his desk, you might have a funny smile on your face, but you will probably remember his name!

8. Write
Whenever you can, take a moment to write down information you want to remember. The act of writing it down helps commit it to memory. If you’ve been introduced to several people at a social function, for example, it is sometimes a good idea to step away from the group for a moment and jot down bits of pertinent information.

9. Act
If you want to remember how to do something from what someone has shown you, or from instructions you’ve read, the best way is to try and do it yourself. It’s like trying to remember the rules to a game. You read through them but you don’t often understand them until you actually play a round.

10. Speak
When trying to absorb written information, it is often helpful to read it aloud. Your brain not only sees but hears the information and as a result may retain it better.

Apply these techniques and you’ll be on your way to a better memory!

Every business, organization and individual needs passion. Without it, we are like robots… just doing a job and getting through the day. Passion is energy. Passion is dreams. Passion is what moves us to act. Passion is living life to its fullest. For some, it is a little more buried within than for others, but the capability for passion lies within us all.

Unfortunately, there are some obstacles that we encounter from time to time that hinder our passion. In order to live our life with passion, we must recognize these barriers and break them down. Here are some passion blockers to watch out for:

Fear is possibly the biggest passion blocker of all. Regardless of how passionate we may be about doing something, there is always that fear that we’ll fail. The funny thing is, if we don’t try we can’t ever succeed! Ignore that fearful voice inside your head and listen instead to that quiet voice of passion in the background.

Over thinking. If we were to act on something straight away without thinking about it, we would be acting out of passion. But rarely do we act without thinking, and that’s a good thing. But over thinking a situation to the point where we ultimately do nothing at all, is a bad thing. We need to include both passion and thought in our day to day decisions.

Conditioning. Having passion means being able to express our innermost feelings. It means being able to demonstrate, and act upon, our enthusiasm. Far too many individuals have been conditioned to believe that showing emotion or enthusiasm is a bad thing. The classic example? Boys don’t cry. Never be afraid to express how you really feel!

Pessimism. Passion breeds on success. Far too often we focus on the negative rather than the positive things in our lives, emphasizing what we haven’t done rather than applauding our accomplishments. If we focus on negative events, we’re bound to get negative results. Too much negativity will eventually squash any and all of the passion within us.

Our business coaching program teaches you that passion is there inside all of us, and there are simple ways to let it shine. Give yourself permission to feel. Be brave enough to take a risk or two without fearing failure. Surround yourself with passionate people. Cultivate optimism and a positive attitude. Be focused, but not obsessive. Celebrate every accomplishment no matter how small, and share it with others. Keep a sense of humor and develop the ability to laugh at yourself and at life. Be happy!

If this article has helped you think about driving passion in your business and your life, share it with your friends with one of the links above. If you have a blog or website, you can link to it or even post it to your own site (don’t forget to mention www.OneCoach.com as the original source).

A guy I used to work with drove me crazy. It seemed that every time I asked him whether he had taken care of something I had asked him to do, he would say, “I don’t have the time. I can’t do it.” This baffled me since I saw him take long lunches, leisurely surf the internet, clown around with other employees and even take time out of his day to run personal errands. Yes, he was busy all right, but he wasn’t productive.

Gandhi said, “Action expresses priorities.” Don’t we all make time for those things that are most important to us? What my colleague was really telling me is that he didn’t see the importance of the task. Let me give you an example: As a working mom I put my kids in daycare. One day I got a call from the daycare telling me my daughter had fallen out of her highchair and bumped her head. I dropped everything I was doing to go pick her up. She turned out to be okay by the way, but I decided that I had to take control of my time and my priorities. I sat down with my calendar and cleared it out. There wasn’t anything more important in my life than my child. She was going to receive all of my time and attention.

Think of your business as your child. If it’s screaming for your attention and you say, “I just don’t have the time” then you are fooling yourself and hurting your business. At OneCoach, we recognize the importance of spending time wisely. We get our clients focused in on their highest impact and income-producing activities (HIPA). Maximizing your ability to focus in on those valuable activities will increase your revenue, your cash flow and your profit.

Juggling too many day-to-day tasks will force you to become reactive instead of proactive. Being reactive — putting out fires all day — long reduces the effectiveness of your performance and ultimately your bottom line. Stop trying to be a “one-horse show”, wearing so many hats that you will start to feel like what one of my clients told me recently… “one of those plate spinners at the carnival.” You can’t run a business by barely keeping everything together!

You may be so overwhelmed that you don’t know where to begin each day. Here’s how to eliminate all the time wasters and time bandits in your life and maximize your performance by focusing on the best use of your time.

Start by keeping track of your time.
You should be very, very clear on everything in your day that is taking up your time. Take a good hard look at all the activities you are doing, all your processes, procedures, and commitments. Are you a serial procrastinator? Do you spend time reading junk emails, daydreaming, making personal phone calls and surfing the web? Or are you on-task and laser-focused on your goals for the future? Accountants and attorneys usually bill by 15-minute increments. If they don’t track their time, if they aren’t performing activities that are billable, they don’t get paid. How are you spending your 15-minute increments of time? Wisely or foolishly?

Take a minute to figure out what your time is actually worth.
Divide your annual salary by 2080 (which is 52 weeks at 40 hours per week). This will give you an hourly rate for your time. For instance, if you are making $100,000 per year, your hourly rate is $48 per hour. Are you doing activities that could easily be delegated to someone at a much lower hourly rate? Are there some tasks that you should be eliminating, delegating, and outsourcing? Wouldn’t it be more productive to spend your time generating leads vs. doing menial work? Why not pay someone $10 per hour to run your personal errands so you can spend your time closing deals and generating more revenue?

Prioritize your activities by how much revenue they bring.
After you’ve looked at everything you are doing on a daily basis then pick out the activities that will bring you the most revenue. But keep your list short. What is the most valuable task on your list? Establish a ranking value for each task. Decide whether it is a first, second or third priority.

Organize your activities.
Remember the “touch it once” rule. If you touch it…take action. Don’t reread, revisit or re-file. The whole idea is to be efficient. Get your workspace under control. De-clutter and get rid of things that you don’t need. I use four paper trays each labeled as follows, “To Do, To Read, To Pay, To File.” This helps me keep things under control.

Plan ahead.
Before the end of the day, review your schedule and plan what you intend to accomplish the next day. I always pick the hardest task to accomplish first. That way everything else seems easy by comparison.

You have a clear choice. You can either stay in overwhelm or you can take control of your life. Remember, you are exchanging your life and your time for your business. Make sure that you choose the way you are investing your time as well.

If you need help with managing your day-to-day overwhelm, I recommend you check out OneCoach’s Business Momentum Club to learn proven strategies to growing your business.

Part of running and growing a small business includes having to deal with continuous challenges big and small: the printers don’t work, there was a delay in product shipment, you lose your best client, the leader of an entire division of the company resigned, you’re barely able to make payroll. The list can go on and on.

What differentiates the entrepreneurs that break through these challenges and capture success from the entrepreneurs who allow challenges to overwhelm them, cloud their mindset, and detrimentally impact their performance to lead their company?

The difference is the successful entrepreneurs have redefined their definition of what a challenge is. The successful entrepreneur embraces challenges and understands there is no escaping them in any business. A challenge shifts from a disastrous negative experience to a positive golden opportunity to receive feedback and iterate, make improvements and optimizations to systems, processes, products and services, management style, etc., to offer better service and more value to employees and clients.

Readjusting your definition of a challenge can significantly impact your company culture and create a relentless, persistent, and progressive environment for which challenges are the norm, and looked upon in a positive and constructive light.

Other tips to dealing with and breaking through challenges in business:

1) Stay focused on the “Why”

What is the deep-rooted reason for getting up everyday and doing what you do? What is your deep-rooted motivation? What are you really trying to accomplish and what is your personal reasoning behind that? Thinking about your “why” can empower and motivate you to persist, even through tough times.

2) Visualize the desired outcome

Painting a clear mental picture of your ideal outcome, like a beautiful work of art, can motivate and inspire you to overcome roadblocks in your business. You can also create a mental movie where you visualize yourself living in your accomplishments as if they were happening in present time. Visualization can also help keep you on target and focused on the positives.

3) Change the physiology to adjust the psychology

When challenges arise, if you feel any bit of stress or overwhelm, adjust your physiology – get up, take deep breaths, go for a walk outside, go to the gym, jump in the hot tub – do something immediately that will help create mental clarity and keep your mind from “thinking” yourself to death.

4) Ask a business coach or a mentor

If you are experiencing challenges in your business, there’s a great chance that somebody has helped those who have experienced these similar challenges before. Consult with a business coach who has helped grow a successful business and ask them how they helped their clients overcome their challenges and roadblocks.

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Almost every person alive procrastinates at one time or another; it’s human nature. But for some people, procrastination can be extremely damaging to both their professional and personal well-being. In business particularly, procrastination can keep progress and success from ever happening. Our business consulting and business coaching experts often cite procrastination as one of the hardest obstacles for business owners to overcome. So why do we procrastinate, and how can we control it?

First let’s look at the why. Most of us procrastinate for two reasons; either we believe that the task at hand is too large for us to tackle, or it’s simply something we find unpleasant to do. You have to understand why you have a procrastination issue before you can figure out how to overcome it.

Here are some ways you can tame this time-sucking monster:

Shrink the task. When a task seems too large or overwhelming, it often helps to break it down into smaller pieces. There’s an old proverb that’s always good to remember. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” Sometimes once we’ve started on a small piece of the project, we build a momentum that takes over and we continue on to the finish.

Know it. Make sure you have all the information relevant to the task. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed because of the way something sounds to us, when in fact, it isn’t actually that way at all. For example, you feel overwhelmed if you think you have to take inventory and wait on customers at the same time, when in fact, extra help has been brought in to handle the customers so you can focus on getting the task completed.

Plan. Once you have all the information, draw up a plan of action for getting the task completed. This way you can see the steps you need to take and check them off to monitor your progress.

Set a goal. Some past procrastinators say that setting a deadline helps them to beat procrastination. Getting focused on the deadline drives them to complete the task.

Visualize. Some people are motivated to get the job done by visualizing all the benefits that will come from completing the project.

Grit your teeth. Try to do those things that you least like right away. Chances are you have to do them eventually anyway so why not get them done and out of the way.

Reward yourself. Promise yourself some type of reward for completing the project. For a large project, write breaks into your plan and give yourself something special each time you reach one of those breaks.

Understand consequences. Identify the disadvantages of not completing the task at hand and ask yourself if you are willing to live with them.

The first real step in conquering procrastination is recognizing it as a part of your personality. Try to determine what your procrastination triggers are and work to avoid them. It will undoubtedly take effort to change a habit as strong as procrastination can be, but stay determined! Your life will be all the better for it!

If you liked this article, share it with your friends using one of our sharing buttons. If you have a blog or website, you can link to this article or even post it to your own site (don’t forget to mention www.OneCoach.com as the original source).