Posts for the ‘Personal Development Advice’ Category
Overcome Insecurities To Develop Your Personal Brand
Steve Adubato wrote an an article in the Star Ledger, NJ’s largest newspaper, about Book Yourself Solid and how I overcame insecurities and conflicting intentions to develop a big (and meaningful) personal brand identity. Here is an expert:
Business coach Michael Port wrote a terrific book called “Book Yourself Solid” in which he offers this insight: “Business problems are really personal problems in disguise.”
Port says many of the challenges he has faced in “fully expressing himself” were blocked early on in his career by what he called “conflicting intentions.” He knew he needed to promote himself and his work in a more aggressive way, but he had an inner struggle because he kept asking himself what his father, a respected physician, would think if he engaged in this kind of self-promotion.
Read the rest of the article here.
6 Comments »The #1 Barrier to Success and Fulfillment
Failure to truly learn is the number one barrier to sustained success and fulfillment. In a brilliant and fun TED Talk in 2006, Sir Ken Robinson, says education is meant to take us into a future that we can’t grasp. Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Yet, nobody has a clue what the world will look like in 5 years, let alone in 2065. Watching his talk is worth the 20 minutes it takes.
Sir Ken is quite entertaining but the subject of his talk couldn’t be more serious. He criticizes the prevailing approach to education as one that crushes creativity and doesn’t prepare us for the future. The prevailing approach to learning has been characterized as a “banking approach.” We gobble up information, and deposit it in our “brain bank,” so that we can withdraw it when we need it. We learn so that we “know about” things. But this interpretation of learning is very weak. Knowhow will beat “know about” any day. Just because you’ve read a book about business (or even a hundred), doesn’t mean you know how to generate great business results.
Learning is not just gobbling up information so that we have it at hand when we need it. That doesn’t work. True leaning is about becoming more skillful, even more masterful, in producing results that satisfy us and our customers. True learning expands the horizon of what’s possible. What previously looked impossible now looks possible, once we have learned. True learning is innovative and creative. True learning is cognitive, emotional, somatic, relational, and even spiritual. True learning takes us beyond what we know today. True learning enables us to unfold our potential, to express what’s ours to express, and to make the difference we want to make in the world.
True learning is alive, engaged, creative, fun, and freeing. True learning requires the freedom to make mistakes. If you don’t take risks, you never really learn how to do something. Going beyond what we know requires us to take creative leaps that may fail. Making mistakes is stigmatized in our culture today and we get marked down in school for making them. This crushes creativity and turns learning into a dead, disengaged, and dull thing.
As the world continues to change, the only sustainable competitive advantage for any business or service professional is true learning. Those that have learned how to truly learn, effectively and efficiently, will have the edge. Learning to learn will open up new possibilities for you to live in a future of your own design. This is our not-so-secret agenda at Booked Solid U.
As a service professional, the best gift you can give yourself is permission to make mistakes. Doing this is one of the most powerful ways of supporting your true learning.
The future belongs to the learners. Does the future belong to you?
1 Comment »Free Small Business Networking & Referral Group
Sometimes I love working alone and others times I hate it. It can be lonely and isolating. I much prefer collaborating and connecting with others. Sure, we have all the social media outlets but they can be overwhelming, unfocused, and filled with irrelevant ideas and information.
So, last year, I created the Booked Solid Referral Network. It was a free online community for business owners who wanted to connect with each other in very purposeful and profitable ways. Specifically around networking and referrals . Because, if you network with the right people, you’ll get more referrals. It worked. In just a few short months over 3500 business owners joined . We were building something special.
But I closed it down. Don’t worry, it’s back up now. I closed it because the massive software platform we were using sucked, plain and simple. It was too big and offered too much. I since learned that sometimes, less is more.
So, today, we re-open the doors to the Booked Solid Referral Network. It’s streamlined and simplified. It’ll take us a few months to grow the community but I wanted to personally invite you to be a charter member and build the community in your image.
Sign up takes 2 minutes and it’s free. No strings attached. Go for it!
6 Comments »Learning Small Business Success from People You Don’t Like
Something I’d like to mention about learning and small business success.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to listen to people with whom we don’t always agree. Especially when it comes to “ways of being” or how to go about achieving small business success. Often we think we learn best from those like us but sometimes we learn what we didn’t know we needed to know from those we think different than us and who think different than us. Can you follow that?
I say this because the last time I did a tele-seminar with author and blogger, Tim Ferris, I received a number of comments from my readers regarding what they didn’t like about Tim or his work. The same thing happened when I hosted Michael Gerber or Keith Ferazzi, and even Seth Godin.
Now, don’t get me wrong the majority of comments I have received about all of these folks have been overwhelmingly positive. But, let’s take Tim for example. He is one well-known dude. Heck, about 100,000 people follow him on Twitter. And you don’t get to be a NY Times and Wall Street Journal #1 bestselling author without people being drawn to what you have to say. But, and this is a big but… no one will be universally liked. Ghandi wasn’t. Nor is Nelson Mandela. They were both jailed by their opposition, for goodness sake (Of course, my friend, Tim, is no Mandela or Ghandi (sorry Tim). But you get the point.)
If you have something to say, say it. You may ruffle some feathers. And, feathers will be ruffled at high altitudes. You want to fly high, don’t you?
So, tell me, who have you learned from—that you didn’t think you “liked”? (You don’t have to mention names. Just say, Mr. or Ms. X.)
No Comments »The Case For Big Thinking
If you have not yet read The Think Big Manifesto, shame on you. Kidding. But, if you haven’t, here’s a PDF from a section of the book that I call, The Case For Big Thinking (Or The Case Against Small Thinking). Enjoy. Feel free to send it to whomever you like. I’m sure you know someone who wants/needs to think bigger about who they are and what they offer the world.
1 Comment »
