Personal Growth

Sales and marketing are critical to improving the top line dollars. Solid organizing and time management skills are a must. But first you have to start by making up your mind to do something different…in order to get different results.

Here are your productivity tips for this month:

1.      What’s the goal? If you don’t know what you’re shooting for, then how will you know when you get there? Focusing energy and spending time on things that aren’t even on your radar wastes precious time you can’t recapture. Be smart…and wise.

2.      Execute on priorities. Knowing your priorities is one thing. Getting to them is another. Shifting priorities is the norm in today’s business environment. That means you need to consistently review your high-payoff activities and go to them first…and often.

3. Make appointments with yourself. If you want to actually accomplish items 1 and 2 above, it requires dedicated, focused time to do what you need to do. Mark time out in your calendar for this important work. Make appointments with yourself…and honor them.

Ó 2007 Cynthia Kyriazis

In my last issue, I shared information on the advisor we have who talks to us about others. Today I’m covering the one who talks to us about ourselves. It’s called the Self-Esteem advisor.

This is all about the type of advice you give yourself…about yourself. From some of the assessments I have conducted, sometimes this advice is not very kind. In fact, it can be quite unforgiving towards us. So I frequently ask, who’s in charge? You or your advisor?

To be consumed by self-criticism, fear, and doubt about yourself crates negative thoughts that prevent you from using your greatest talents and climbing to your highest peaks.

Did you know that 95% of the people in the western world strives to be ‘perfect’? It’s an unrealistic expectation that many people struggle to achieve. An equally high percentage of people feel their ideas are tied to their self worth which can cause us to try to impress others, pretend things are different than they really are, and experience shame because perhaps you failed at something. It advises you not to try again. For example, you hear ‘I knew I wouldn’t get that sale. I’m a loser.’

These types of feelings are based in fear. How would you feel if you were able to stop these thoughts and replace them with new, more self-encouraging ones? continue

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. It’s about being able to see someone else’s world through your own eyes and identify with the other person’s emotions such as joy, pain, concern and frustration. This is generally based on a similar experience you have experienced in your own life.

Intuition is based on the observations of others you have stored in your subconscious over time. It works well with Empathy and can provide balanced advice about communicating with others– both at work and at home. When this Advisor is in balance, communications run smoothly. When it’s unbalanced, it can hurt or damage relationships.

Dr. Robert Harman was a social scientist who created the mathematical calculation that underlies 6 Advisors. He discovered that a person holds back a reserve of cooperation and productivity by an average of 40%. In other words, you can gain 40% more cooperation and 40% more productivity by actually listening to the person, rather than the chatter in your head.

If you are talking to a prospect, client, employee or family member, are you listening to your internal dialogue? Is it about you or are you hearing them? Are you open and accepting of their situation without judgment? Do you trust the accuracy of you intuition? continue

Consider this. Each of us has somewhere between 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts a day. More than you thought, huh? Some of them help you get what you want and some get in the way of what you want or what you are shooting for. And these results all began with just one thought.

If you attended the Advisors On Target June 26 webinar, you know that I talked about the results of a study I did assessing how successful painting contractors think. What makes them different? How are they so successful? I used the 6 Advisors™ assessment program as the tool for my findings.

6 Advisors is an online assessment program that measures the type of advice you give yourself and the degree of this advice. We each give ourselves advice in 6 different yet distinct arenas. These 6 categories include thoughts relating to:

1. Others
2. Yourself
3. Getting things done
4. The way in which you spend your time
5. Ideas, concepts and discipline
6. Turning dreams into reality and motivation

Your thoughts impact the money you make, the debt you may have, the passion you may or may not have, your energy level, your stress level, your relationships, and your self esteem to name a few.

We all give ourselves plenty of balanced advice and this has helped shape many of our outcomes over the years. But advice we give ourselves that is unbalanced usually ends up resulting in outcomes that may be filled with minefields. The objective is to try and recognize when advisors are out of balance and shift course to achieve better results.

But this advice and internal dialog we all have has probably been around for a long time, so shifting thoughts and making a change will take some focus and diligence.

But change is good! It can mean improving your ability to manage your emotions, choices and actions so you end up with better results and a richer life.

Join me for my next article on the Empathy-Intuition advisor which focuses on the advice we give ourselves about others.

copyright 2008 Cynthia Kyriazis and Six Advisors, Inc.