Guest Blogger Dan Waldschmidt

I’m just going to be me.

I am tired of being the person that you think I should be.  I’m just going to be the best “me” possible.

And isn’t that what you really want from me?

Where did all this start?

We all have a sense about how the world should work.  Right?

The little spoon goes to the left of the big spoon.  The smart kid goes on to be the most successful person in the class.  If you work really hard then you end up having all the best parts of the “American Dream.”

But if you think about it, you didn’t come up with that idea. In fact, you don’t even know the person who came up with those ideas.  And yet for some reason we accept them as fact.

But they aren’t facts.  They aren’t.

What does that mean?

It means that everything you know about what you should be is now wrong.  The slate is clean.  You’re back to square one.

Ohh… and by the way, the people around you aren’t any better qualified than you to start putting plays on the chalkboard.  They are the same goofy nuts who laughed at the same immature jokes that you did in high school.

Sure they look all sophisticated and “put together”.  They look like people whose opinions should matter.

But here’s the reality.  They don’t matter.

Not one little bit.

So what does matter?

You matter.

You’re not a moron.  You actually know more than you think you do.  Sure you’re prone to get turned 37 different directions after listening to all the critics.

But we all do.

We all second guess our motivations, intensions, and strategies.  Sometimes we do it out-loud.  Most of the time, we keep that in our heads.

And that’s even more dangerous.  Because the monsters in that playground are even more dangerous.

So what’s the plan?

Here is the secret to ultimate satisfaction: “Stop doing and start being…”

Be the best “you” possible.

And only you really knows the full potential of what that could be.

It’s bigger than you have ever imagined.  It’s more successful than the critics would ever give your credit for.

Some people will love you.  The rest will still think you’re a loser.  Either way, you won’t really care you’re too busy being the best you possible.

And there is something ultimately satisfying about being all you can be.

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Dan Waldschmidt is a former high-growth technology CEO, one of the founders of IntroMojo, a popular inspirational speaker, and a sought-after strategist on creating edgy conversations in the marketplace. He blogs regularly on his popular motivational selling blog Edge of Explosion and is the husband to a cute gal named Sara and the father to two energetic boys. He’s just an ordinary dude who happens to have an outrageous vision. And he wants to help you change the world…

Carl Taylor, Entrepreneur and Author

There are a lot of websites and speakers that are trying to motivate you. They motivate you to take action, to get off your ass and achieve more. But if you’re an idiot and someone motivates you, you are now just a motivated idiot, and you are going to do idiotic things faster.

Motivated idiots are those people who go to their first property seminar, hear a sales pitch disguised as education that says you must invest right now in this off the plan unit block, immediately sign on the dotted line and a few years later wonder why they don’t have the returns they expected.

I’m not meaning to have a go at seminar selling, or even property seminars; they are viable business methods and have their place.  What you should be focusing on is “their first” as in it was their first seminar. The presenter did a great job and got them motivated, but at this stage they were just a motivated idiot and they made an idiotic decision because they didn’t know what questions to ask.

No need to be alarmed as there is a cure… a 3 step process that you can use to avoid being a Motivated Idiot.

Step 1. Get Educated

Step 2. GET Educated

Step 3. GET EDUCATED

Education is the key…and I’m not talking typical education that you go to school or university for years and years to get. I’m talking about practical how-to steps and specific experiences – the kind of knowledge that you get from having been there and done that, from mentors and friends, the kind of knowledge that is shared in non-fiction books and videos and at educational seminars.

The better educated you are on a subject, the better the questions you can ask, which in turn will help you make better decisions.

So get out there and educate yourself, pick a topic and start absorbing information through books, mentors, seminars and so forth…then you will know that you are not a motivated idiot.

Here’s to YOUR Success.

Carl Taylor is the author of Red Means Go! - Secrets to Achieving a Happy, Effective and Successful Life with You in the Driver’s Seat, which is now available on iTunes!  Get TWO free chapters from www.carltaylor.com.au

Apparently May was ‘launch a new coaching program online’ month. Launch guru Dave Navarro wrote about some negative reactions to the flurry of program launches which left some folks feeling assaulted. Dave shares some thoughts from his side of the table; he’s the expert and I’ll stay out of that.

Instead, I’ll get into this: would everybody please stop looking for a magic process, and understand that it’s all about outcomes?

We all want a machine where we drop in $20 bills and crank a handle that turns them into $100 bills. It doesn’t exist. There is no machine to make money in sales. Selling is not about processes.

Yes folks, you read that right: selling ain’t about process.

I know, you’ve read about NEADs, and the steps you go through and in what order and you know you’re supposed to have systems in place.

Here’s the secret: each of those is an outcome, not a process. Following the process without focusing on the right outcome is worthless. Focus on the outcome, and the right process for this single instance will become self-evident.

Sure, you should know what your client is doing now. That’s an outcome; you knowing what they’re doing now. It’s not a process. As long as you ethically and effectively gather this information, it doesn’t matter what ‘process’ you use.

What do they enjoy about the current solution? Yup; it’s an outcome.

What do they want to alter? Again, outcome, not process. But great googlymooglies; what would happen if you found this out before you found out what they enjoy? Is the process broken? Nonsense!

Your desired outcome is to know whether they have a need which you can fill, and whether you and they feel you’re the right one to fill it.

And it does not matter one whit what process you use to reach that outcome, as long as you do it within ethical and reasonable bounds. It will, however, be infinitely more successful if the process you choose in each individual case is comfortable for you and the folks you’re dealing with.

That’s also why copying someone else’s ‘process’ (like all those launch folks have done) or, in fact, why blindly repeating your own process, is short-sighted and lazy.

That’s not a recipe for success in sales.

**This post brought to you by Joel D Canfield, Business Heretic

If you’re not going to put 100% effort into doing a great job then don’t do your job. Just stay home. Catch up on some sleep. Take the day and vege. Heck, take the rest of your career off.

While that’s a pretty rough statement, in this “value-driven world” it’s very appropriate. Luckily there’s a positive side to it as well.

Very early on my grandfather drilled the need to “do your job well” into my head. His favorite one-liner was, “If you don’t have the time to do it right the first time how are you ever going to have the time to do it over?” (And believe me, if he thought it wasn’t right you DID do it over.) Lucky Strikes and Jim Beam aside, my grand-dad was a wise man.

He also taught me to shake hands the proper way, to remember names, and always say “thank you”. He never read an email and probably wouldn’t have made it as long as he did if somebody had sent him a TXT message. If he were alive today I’m sure he’d be labeled a renaissance man.

Fast forward 20 years and we are multi-tasking our way through our day trying to cram 60+ hours into a (some say*) reasonable 40 hour work week. And then balance that with family, eating right and getting enough exercise and rest. If this is you then I have a question; How’s that working for ya?

Hey Todd! You mentioned a positive side, care to expand on that?

Yep, slow really is fast!

We slow down.

We do everything we do with 100% of our focused energy.

And we complete it – correctly and in a timely manner. (Do you remember that feeling called accomplishment?)

The bottom line is if we are not committed to doing something with everything we’ve got then why even start it? Eliminate it. And that frees up the time necessary to other things well.

Do it for 30 days. Your business, personal, and spiritual life will reward you in ways that you can only dream about today. Let’s both do it. And then we’ll talk in a month and share how our lives changed.

Thank you for taking the time read this. I appreciate you!

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Todd Pillars is an Appreciation Coach and Relationship and Referral Builder. Please contact him today at 419-855-2273 or todd@toddpillars.com to SUPERCharge your Referrals!

Or head on over to http://www.idealreferral.com to discover how to set your Referrals on AutoPilot.

It’s true: humans can’t multitask. As Jerry may have said (and if not, I’m saying it), it’s a fact, not an opinion; accept it and get over it.

You can’t multitask. But you can still do more than one thing at a time.

Remember the guy on Ed Sullivan who, um, right; you have no clue who Ed Sullivan was. Anyway, there was this thing called a ‘variety show’ on something called ‘television’ with ‘entertainers’ who, y’know, did stuff.

There was always some guy who’d come out with a bunch of six foot tall sticks on stands. Skinny sticks, maybe half an inch thick. He’d set a china plate on top of one, start it spinning, then keep it spinning with the stick. It’s a cool trick, and not as hard as it looks. Do not discuss this subject with my mother; it seems to upset her.

Anyway, once the first plate was spinning, he’d start another. Get it spinning, check the first one to be sure it was spinning well, and start a third. Check the first two, and start a fourth.

Eventually, he had a lot of plates spinning. A lot.

So, here’s the thing: how many plates do you think he touched at the same time?

One.

If he started grabbing two of the sticks to get the plates spinning, he couldn’t possiblly look at two plates at the same time. One or the other was dust.

He could prepare by putting his hand on the next stick, so that the instant his eyes moved to that plate he was ready to spin, but it was always one at a time, one at a time.

Here’s a dirty secret the computer geeks don’t want you to know: computers don’t actually multitask, either. Nuh uh. Not really. The unitask, one task at a time, jumping from one spinning plate to another so fast that it appears to be working on all of them simultaneously.

Now, that, you can do.

Get a plate spinning. Once you know that process or project is moving, and doesn’t need your immediate attention (whether it’s because it’s waiting on input from someone else, or because others have been trained to manage the next step) move on to the next project. Keep monitoring each project, but have systems in place that let the plates spin with their own momentum without needing your attention every single moment. (Yeah, this means you have to let go of control. One more thing to get over.)

You cannot safely drive and talk on the phone. You cannot listen to the client on the phone while reading email. You can’t work on business while spending time with your significant other or the kids.

But you can spin a whole lotta plates all at once, because plates have momentum.

Joel D Canfield is a Business Heretic and author of The Commonsense Entrepreneur, one of the 5 best business books Jerry has ever read.

The folks over at Bloggertone have a great vision: they want to bring together bloggers who write about topics related to small business so that entrepreneurs and business owners can have a single source for valuable information about sales, finance, marketing, management and a host of other topics.  They’re off to a great start; since they launched in October of 2009, they’ve added 50 talented business bloggers to the family, and they’re growing by the day.

As a way to introduce themselves to a larger audience, they’ve been running a business blogging contest in collaboration with BizSugar, the bookmarking site for business-related articles on the web.  The contest is called Sugartone, and you can read a little more about it by clicking here.

Being the blogging-junkie that I am, I couldn’t resist the call to write a guest post for the contest.  You can read that post by clicking here.  I hope you enjoy reading the post as much as I enjoyed writing it; it touches on a topic that will be familiar to regular readers of this blog. 

And if you do enjoy it, maybe you could leave a comment and/or vote for the post?  That’d be the bees knees!

Thanks again for reading!

Joel D Canfield, The Commonsense Entrepreneur

***Note from Jerry: I’m looking forward to a lively debate on this one.  My friend, Joel D Canfield, wrote this post.  I’m guessing some of you will have an opinion you’d like to share with Joel.  I certainly do.  I’ll withhold mine for a couple of days to allow the debate to run its course, then chime in with a post of my own in response (just because we’re friends doesn’t mean we always see eye-to-eye).  Only one rule: play nice.  Let your voice be heard, but please do it respectfully.  Let the games begin! ***

As I sit here waiting for my computer to finally open this image for editing, I ponder my control issues.

My computer isn’t especially slow. I just demand a lot from it. Sometimes it rebels by usurping control. (Tom Berarducci says that spinning hourglass is because computers don’t have the physical facilities to make other gestures.) I sit and watch, unable to click on something else, anything else, so I can do something while I wait on my computer.

Some programmer somewhere decided that my computer and I needed protection from each other; that, at some point, I was going to ask too much, or the wrong thing, and that it’s best to decide on my behalf when I should click, and when I should sit and wait.

It’s maddening. Yes, I know that if I go do other things, the already-slow process will become slower. And if I do too much, I can bog it down to the point that it appears not to move at all.

I don’t care. It’s my choice. Well, it should be.

When you’re talking to and working with clients or prospects or suspects, do you give them control? Do they know that when and how and if this process moves forward is their choice? Are they comfortable pushing things in a new direction, asking for something that’s not on the menu, engaging you in a dialog that involves more than multiple choice or true and false responses?

Those people who give you the privilege of being in business, your clients and prospects and suspects—do you put them through maddening spinning-hourglass moments where they feel powerless, helpless to do (or get you to do) what they know, clearly and obviously, is the right thing?

My friend Trevor Gay talks about giving power away in order to keep it. Move the fulcrum closer to the work, and your lever is more effective. Move the perception of control to match the center of real control (with them, not you) and you become more effective.

Since parenting skills make great business skills, here’s an example of giving control and being more effective: our 5-year-old loves changing her clothes eleven times a day. She knows something vague about clothing belonging in drawers, but never quite got the concept that similar clothes went in similar drawers, or that the clothing should be clean when it was put in the drawers.

Last time Mommy organised the Little One’s dresser, we took a different tack. Since LO loves maps, Mommy had her draw a map of the dresser, with labels for what clothing went in which drawer. It was fun, but more importantly, it gave her control. She chose what went where. When she was done, she had a map and a process that made sense to her.

And her clean clothes are still in the right drawers, a month later. (I suspect we should add the hamper to the map . . . )

A primary business failure is succumbing to the fear that this one might get away; that if we don’t control the situation, we’ll lose the sale or contract or opportunity. Here’s the reality: you can’t lose control. You never had it.

Enlightened entrepreneurs don’t fear this realisation, they embrace it; they shine a bright light on it; they make real sure their clients and prospects and suspects know who’s really in charge.

Of course, they know already. They just need to know that you know too.

Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz of Go For No

The word ‘YES’ is so positive, encouraging… and it means we’re succeeding. ‘NO’ on the other hand, is bad, depressing… and it means we failed.  What if, starting today, the word ‘no’ didn’t stop you? What if every time you heard the word no, you became stronger, more powerful, and more resilient?  Well you can.

For most of us, we don’t like to hear the word “no” when it comes to selling our products and services. We fight our way through it every step of the way.  If you are working your business and when you get a “yes” you feel wonderful and when you get a ”no” you feel bad, then you are going to feel bad pretty often.  Because when you are in business, when you sell anything – especially today – the No’s are out there!  And if you are feeling bad about the “no’s” you get, you might slow down, get discouraged, avoid business building… you might even quit altogether.

Yet there is an irony about Yes and No (Failure and Success) and it is this: when you go out of your way to increase the number of “no’s” you get, the yeses will show up at your door in greater quantities than you ever could have imagined! This is the essence of the “Go for No!” philosophy.

In part it is a “numbers game.” However, in addition to getting more NO’s we want you to start feeling differently about the process. Stop fighting and battling through the NO’s!  So, the question is, how do you start feeling good about hearing “no” in your business?  You can do it by reprogramming the way you think about it.  You must think differently about the no’s that you are hearing. The truth is that when you hear “no” you are taking action in your business and that is a very good thing! Take pride in the NO’s that you are getting. Start rewarding yourself for your the NO’s rather than punishing. After a “no” you must celebrate and at all costs avoid your negative self talk: (“He said ‘no’ – what am I doing? I can’t do this. I’m a total failure”…on and on.)

In fact, we would like to challenge you to get 10 no’s this week. And if you get those 10 no’s we would like you to go out and treat yourself to your favorite thing. Because you are engaging in the success behaviors that are going to take you to where you want to go. And who knows, when you go for those ten no’s there might be some yeses hiding in there!

So my friends Bill Walker and Meghan Wood (and their trusty producer PP) just started a new podcast called The Bill and Meghan Show.  Check it out…it’s very entertaining.

Knowing what an attention hound I am, Bill asked me to contribute a weekly post to their blog.  Of course I said “Yes!”

And so it’s with great pleasure that I announce my first ever guest blog post!

Let me know what you think (i.e., leave a comment) and be sure to subscribe to Bill and Meghan’s weekly podcast while you’re at it.

Cheers!

P.S.  If you’d like have me pen (er, type) a guest post for your blog, shoot me an email or leave a comment.  I’m sure I’ll agree, unless your blog is about something horrible like clubbing baby seals…