Are you creating results or just trying to?

Recently I took part in a four-week challenge put on by the gym I go to. For four weeks I had (with recommendations and guidelines from the trainers) determined what I would do for four weeks to challenge myself for the purpose of being fitter/healthier at the end of the 4-week intensive.

I could make the rules as tight or as loose as I liked, with the awareness that the decisions I made would influence my results.

I don’t like a lot of rules… and so I let myself believe that I didn’t have to give up coffee and wine (which I don’t intend to in the long run) but that I would avoid them… I decided that I would give up sugar and grains.

Now.. I know myself well enough to know that ruling something out totally means 100% commitment but ‘avoiding’ gives me loopholes through with to slide and make excuses.  It’s the difference between DOING SOMETHING and TRYING to DO SOMETHING. It’s the difference between GETTING RESULTS and TRYING TO GET RESULTS.

Have you said to yourself:

“I will try and work on my business 3 times a week for one hour at a time.”?

versus committing 100% and saying:

“I will work ON my business plan 3 times a week for one hour at a time.”?

I have!

You can, as a result, get to the end of the week and have accomplished either!

“Well, I tried… but other things came up..”

OR

“I worked on my business for three hours this week.”

We have enough pressure on us as business people without needing to punish ourselves for not doing what we set out to, but I know from my  own example that I did what I said I’d do….

• I avoided drinking
• I avoided going to bed too late

• I didn’t eat sugar
• I didn’t eat grains

and so I can honestly say I did these things. I kept my word to myself, both ways.

I just know that not committing to something 100% could be a clue as to why I may not be performing to my peak in other areas of my life or business.

So, I’m now reflecting on ….

• What am I 100% committed to doing?
• What am I only willing to half-commit to?

It doesn’t matter to me which one I’m choosing as long as I’m doing it consciously and not fooling myself.

Suzi

PS In case you’re interested… here is what I did do on the 4-week Intensive:

I chose to:

• Cut alcohol down to four glasses of wine a week
• Reduce my milky coffee intake from 2 x soy flat white coffees a day to 1 x ‘milky’ coffee and if I had a 2nd it would be a macchiato
• No sugar (including honey) except from fruit
• No grains (except oats)
• Only fruit allowed was pear, apple, blueberries, strawberries and kiwi (but only 2 pieces max per day
• Eating 5 small meals a day (and managing my portions each time)
• Working out 5 times a week
• Limit dairy to cottage cheese and yoghurt
• Avoid red meat and eating more fish
• Get to bed by 10pm and try and get at least 7 hours of sleep
• Take my vitamins/supplements daily

My Goals were to:

• reduce body fat %
• lose 2kg
• get stronger
• ween myself off the daily sugar treats (usually a piece or two of chocolate at dinner)
• drink less alcohol

My results were:

• The first week I suffered. I felt very tired from the lack of sugar. By week three I was more energetic than usual (and those of you who know me know that I already have lots of energy).
• My jeans started to feel loose around the waistline by week 3.
• My running speed seemed to improve by week four – to the tune of running on average 0.5km an hour faster.

I had my measurements on Monday and the results were better than I’d hoped… much better.

What I don’t know is how much better they would have been had I totally cut out alcohol and the milky soy coffees. Truth is, I don’t intend to cut them out forever… so I didn’t want to set myself up for a regime that I’d not be willing to stick to for 70-80% of the time.

Wanted – Women who want to be more effective online

I want to let you in on something…

At the Australian Businesswomen’s Network (ABN) we recognise (and are often told by members) that MORE training and education about how to have a successful online presence, how to have a great website, how to get more traffic, and how to use social media is essential for women in small business.

So, when the opportunity arose for us to ask the Government for support to create a national program to help women get their business online, and to help women improve the results of their websites, we jumped at the chance.

We are in the process of completing a proposal (that we’ll present to the government next week) for a new national training program. The Doing Business Online Training Program* will be available to you at no cost.

But to make it happen I need your help.

We need to show evidence that (what we suspect) there IS a need for a training program that gives women in business skills and education to build successful online businesses and to extend their existing businesses online. And, that as a leading Australian education provider, the ABN is the right organisation to spearhead this initiative.

So, I have a few short questions I’d like you to answer. They are in this quick survey which will take you less than 5 minutes to complete. Your answers will make up part of our application to demonstrate the need for this program – with real-life comments and views from Australian women in business.

The success of our proposal requires that our community – YOU – are shown to support the development of this program.

I appreciate your time, and thank you in advance. Go to the survey now.
Sincerely,

Suzi

P.S. Pass the link on to other women in business. The more feedback and evidence we have that a program like this is needed and wanted, the more likely the government will provide the support for us to develop an outstanding program for your benefit.

It will take you less than 5 minutes to tell us what we can do to help you get started and get firing with an online aspect to your business.

*Doing Business Online is a working title only.

Thanks to ABN member Kate Tribe of Tribe Research for her help compiling these survey questions.

Is your resistance getting in the way of your progress?

Earlier this week I had an opportunity to watch my behaviour and my ability to get in my own way.

It was one of those times when you watch yourself, hear yourself and have enough awareness to realise what’s happening.. but do not necessarily have the ability to stop yourself.

Let me explain…

On Tuesday I had a personal training session with the owner of the gym I go to. I was running early so decided to go for a 30minute run before the workout. This was a BAAAD idea.

When I returned from the run and read the workout he had planned for me my heart dropped. I had just spent 30-mins running, I was tired, and this workout sounded horrific… long, tough, and I knew it would push me beyond where I wanted to be pushed.

I made these decisions before I even started the workout:

1. I was not going to have fun
2. I would ‘do my best’ (which in this instance meant I’d just get through it)
3. If I was struggling enough (or taking too long) maybe he’d let reduce the number of rounds or reduce the difficulty level

I was going to resist… and fight.

And here’s what happened.

Within a few minutes of the workout I was feeling tired and wishing I didn’t have to be there.Very intuitively my trainer said to me: “Know that I’m not going to let you not finish this.”

Darn! Now I was stuck.

So… I very cleverly (or so I thought) developed these symptoms:

• Cramps – First my right calf screamed in pain so much I had to stop what I was doing and get my leg stretched to reduce the pain. Then, both legs cramped. Now I had to stop for a couple of min to recover. (The embarrassment of being THAT person in the gym that was needing help didn’t matter. What mattered more was that I was getting my way… in a stupid self-destructive way).

• Mind chatter – My mind chatter was loud and clear: “This is stupid” “This is hard” “I don’t want to do this”.

• Incompetence – I couldn’t perform these exercises (though I’d done them before) with any level of skill

• Injury – I managed to split my hand doing pullups (but I had only completed 1.5 rounds of pullups and had to do the other 1.5 rounds with a cut hand)

At one point (between gasps for air) the LIGHT BULB went off. I could now see what I was doing.

I was resisting what I had started out to do!

My goal, of course, was to enjoy working out with a professional who was supporting me to do what I had set out to do – to exercise to improve my performance, to work myself hard.

My resistance was getting in the way! As soon as I realised it I decided I needed to stop what I was doing (self-destructing) and decide what to do next.

I decided I wasn’t going home until I finished the workout and to ’suck it up’ and keep going.

I finished the workout (yes, my time was terrible but I finished)…

Here was my lesson:

No.. it wasn’t that I shouldn’t go to the gym.  The lesson was that I had made a decision: Go to gym and do workout. But… I was resisting rather than staying with the commitment I’d made and really doing what it took to complete the job as successfully as I possibly could.

RESISTANCE IN YOUR BUSINESS – IS IT COSTING YOUR YOUR SUCCESS?

Here’s what resistance looks like in business:

• Quitting – Pretending you didn’t really want something
• Manifestations – e.g. problems, staff issues, mistakes made that could have been foreseen
• Going off course – spending time on busyness rather than business
• Physical pain/illness – getting sick by working yourself too hard/ignoring your body’s needs
• Resignation – Giving up (sometimes that comes with pretending you didn’t want something)

And here are some remedies for self-destructive resistance:

• Take action – taking action (any one small action) closer to the goal can lift your mood and give you a sense of accomplishment if you recognise that you HAVE taken a s
• Get support – A coach that won’t let you give up, a peer support group who will share your goals with you and keep you accountable. And, trust those you’ve entrusted to support you.
• Keep Your Word – If you make a deal with yourself, keep it. Stay committed until the end.
• Go with the flow – Resistance will show it’s face – but don’t harm yourself (physically, emotionally, spiritually) in the process of resisting

Three days later the calf that was cramping is still sore… and I’m sure that’s because I need to get this lesson and to be reminded of it. I’m sure the pain will be gone by tomorrow. It had just been hanging around till I wrote this post to share the lesson.

Cheers

Suzi

P.S. If anything in this post resonates with you, let me know by adding a comment.

P.P.S. @blairsinger shared on twitter this week “You have the ability to override your brain’s negative dialogue that distracts you from your pursuits”.  LVM, pg 154 – http://bit.ly/iGekM

FYI – Here’s the workout:

3 rounds of:

• 500m row
• 45 wall ball (6kg)
• 15 pullups

Can your phone help your work/life balance – Dynamic Business

Recently Dynamic Business magazine held a lunch hosted by Blackberry. The topic – work/life balance and the role that smartphones can play to either help or hinder.

I’m an iPhone user… so on this day I kept my beloved phone out of eyesight to not offend the event sponsors

My iPhone and are are like this (fingers crossed in solidarity) and I don’t know how I functioned before I had one. It’s my mini computer that allows me to manage my life and appointments, listen to podcasts, and synchs beautifully with my Mac (and has the coolest applications that make managing tasks and business easy).

But, back to the subject of work/life balance and smartphones. For me (and what is quoted in the article) work/life balance is something only we can manage – and that tools help (iphones, great online task management systems) but ultimately it’s up to us to focus our time on what matters.

One opinion that was shared by many at the lunch – your work/life balance is not the responsibility of your employer. You may work in an environment that is ‘flexible’ but the employers role is to ensure the business works for its stakeholders. Only you can determine the choices you make about how you spend your time.

We sometimes think we have NO choice. Truth is we ONLY have choice. We are sometimes not  willing to make the choices that support us most.

Work/Life Balance Awards – Applications Close Soon!

Businesses, government and community organisations are encouraged to apply for the 2009-10 National Work-Life Balance Awards (the Awards) ahead of the closing date on COB Friday, 18 September 2009.

 

The Awards will acknowledge leaders in various industry sectors who excel in offering work, life and family initiatives. There will be 13 award category winners and one overall national winner.

Award winners will be able to use a winner’s symbol for a three-year period, helping them to attract employees. Winners will be announced at a ceremony scheduled for February 2010.

 

To apply or to find out more about the Awards go to http://www.deewr.gov.au/worklife or call the Fair Work Infoline on 13 13 94. If you would like further information about other workplace relations initiatives go to www.deewr.gov.au/WorkplaceRelations

How can you most effectively use a strategic marketing plan to elevate the success of your business plan?

We asked our community this question for the current issue of our Women in Business eNewsletter. A compilation of these answers was published for our community of women across Australia to learn from. Click here to read our current newsletter, and click here to read the answers we received.

Please let us know your thoughts, and add a comment here.

What is a small business? The ATO explains.

In response to a common question being asked at the moment,  the ATO has advised as follows:

The tax office definition of a small business is: an individual, partnership, trust or company with aggregated turnover less than $2 million. An aggregated turnover is your annual turnover of any businesses you are connected or affiliated with.

If your previous year’s aggregated turnover (gross income not net profit) was $2 million or less, you are a small business for the current year. If one of your last two year’s aggregated turnover was less than $2 million, you can estimate that your current year will be $2 million or less.

These allow you, as a small business, to access the various PAYG Instalments, GST, CGT, FBT and income tax concessions.

Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace

The Federal Government has released its issues paper on the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace legislation and called for public comment.

Submissions close on 16 October 2009 and instructions on how to make submissions are included in the paper.

Women in the workforce have undeniably come a long way since the days of blatant discrimination and sexism in the 70s.

But in her media release announcing the review, Minister for the Status of Women, Tanya Plibersek, highlighted the fact that the pay gap between male and female full-time earnings is now 17.2 per cent and that over the last decade we have seen a decline in women in executive leadership roles.  

Hopefully, the review will go some way towards forcing the government to strengthen its legislation and address these issues.

Are you a slave to your To-Do list?

Who’s ‘ruling the roost’ when it comes to your daily workflow? For many of us (me included most days), it’s not our big-picture vision, our strategic plan, our business plan, or the big goals that we’ve set for ourselves. More often than not, it’s our to-do list and our email inbox. (For some it’s also the messages we receive through our social networks.)

In a conversation with my coach last week I expressed my frustration at being so weighted by the things that I had to do that I wasn’t getting around to doing. My mood around my to-dos was a solemn one.

Each to-do that was incomplete had tied to it a piece of my energy. Does that makes sense? When I looked at the list I could see that a lot of my attention was on unfinished items – tied up so that I couldn’t use it productively in other ways. It was time to take action and to pull back any wasted energy to the things that matter.

(Many of us have more to-dos than can be accomplished in two life-times, so it’s a big – often emotional- hurdle to make a pact with yourself not to stress about the unimportant and to drop things off the list – or to delay them depending on how relevant they are to moving you towards the dreams and goals that will make you most happy.)

This wasn’t the first time I’d had this conversation (with a coach or with myself). It seemed to be a chronic condition even though I knew better and had evidence that when I a) focus on what’s really important, b) focus my time on the activities that will move me towards my goals and c) maintain perspective and avoid going into autopilot then I tend to feel that I’m ‘on track’ and feel a sense of accomplishment.

I am very productive and get through a LOT on any given week. But, why was I still feeling frustrated and down about the ‘lack of time’ that I was facing?

I have over the years (and many times in any one week!) tried:

1. Read every book written by productivity expert David Allen (highly recommended)
2. Engaged tools such as my iCal tasks function, Omnifocus, Checklists, Word Docs, Paper Diaries.
3. Done the most important tasks first thing each day
4. Prioritised and reprioritised
5. Not checked email every 5 mins
6. Leveraged jobs to staff

All that works (for a time). It does. But I kept falling back  into the feeling of too much to do and not enough time mind-spin.

Change of Strategy  - Be the ‘Source’ of my day

My task for myself this last weekend was to revisit my prime dream and goals and to look at what I can do today, tomorrow, this week that aligns to that prime dream.

What that means to me is that each day I start by designing the day, each day, being sure that I’m not working for my to-do list, but that rather that day’s to-do list reflects what I want to do that day that will move me closer to my goals.

How I free myself from my todo list

I’ll use me as an example to demonstrate how I freed myself from my to-do list (at least, temporarily):

My prime dream includes the areas of:

• Gaining and sharing knowledge with my community
• Connecting with my community and helping them connect with each other
• Creating environments and opportunities for people to learn and grow

(Notice this isn’t three to-do items, it’s a way of being and an intention/focus. There is no end date and this is not something that I’m going to finish any time soon. But, is big enough and exciting enough that it inspires me to keep this intention in mind and to be reminded of it when I get ‘off track’.)

So, as I look at my upcoming day/week, I’ve put in activities and blocks of time where I am doing tasks (a task could be reflecting, journaling – not just busy work) that aligns to that way of being. Then (because I need to reminder) I have put alarms in my diary daily to ask me each day:

“What did I do today that supports my vision?How did I connect with others? Did I gain and share knowledge? Did I create something I’ve wanted to create?”

I’m giving this a try: Take the energy that is attached to my very extensive current list of incomplete items and put it to better use – so that I’m inspired (not daunted by what lays ahead).

Wish me luck!

Suzi

How to best sort friends, contacts, and followers in your social networks

Like many, when I first started using Facebook I would accept most friend invitations even if they were from people I’d not met or didn’t have any connection to. I’d also accept friends of friends – people that were connected to people I actually do know. “Oh… we have 20 ‘friends’ in common – I guess I should accept your invitation”. Just led to more and more people I did not know in my friends list.

About 6 months ago I stopped automatically accepting and ended up with a big list of request that I was unsure what to do with. Friend requests lay pending… for the longest time.

You see here was my issue: I use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn… but I’d been using them all without a lot of thought as to who was connected to me in each network and what I was sharing. It was time to strategise so that a) I could be more focused and b) the conversations I was having in each network were the most relevant to those I was connected to.

Starting to cull contacts – Strategically

So… what to do with these contact and potential contacts?

Here’s my plan for sorting friends, contacts and followers in my social networks. I’m sharing it in hope that if you too want a more strategic approach and to make more sense of your online networks, that this may serve as a thought-starter.

Linked In
If you’re a professional contact who I do not know and perhaps have not exchanged communication with, but you’re interested in connecting with me professionally, then let’s do that on LinkedIn.

While LinkedIn gets feeds from my blog, it doesn’t usually get the personal bits and pieces of information that may be better suited for my Facebook or Twitter friends. I also use LinkedIn’s Q&A service to do market research and connect with experts.

This morning I’ve been un-finding some of the contacts who, while I’d like to be connected with, are not actual friends and perhaps would not be interested in meeting up at the Australian Businesswomen’s Network page… I’m taking not of their names and will go search for them in LinkedIn.

My focus on LinkedIn is PROFESSIONAL.

Twitter
I’m happy to connect with business contacts, customers, thought-leaders, like-minded folks on Twitter.

Twitter is where I combine business and personal the most… and because of the type of forum that Twitter is, I feel comfortable sharing with you business resources as well as the latest great restaurant that I may want to recommend.

My focus here is PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL.

Facebook
Facebook allows us to separate our personal and professional communications by using the Friends and Pages functions.

I’m using the Friends function to connect with people I know or have met whether face to face or virtually and with whom I have some level of relationship.

Pages (and specifically The Australian Businesswomen’s Network page) is where men and women interested business, mentoring, training, networking, learning and connecting with other women in business can connect and share information. (Like many I think Fans is an awkward name for this function – but it is what it is… and so we work with it!)

My focus here is: PERSONAL (Profile) and PROFESSIONAL (Pages).

Hope that helps. Happy (social) networking,

Suzi

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