July 2018 « Confidence Coach

The Power of Your Mindset

Today I just wanted to talk a little bit about the power of your mindset as a business owner, entrepreneur, CEO or leader. One of the things I want you to stop and think about for a minute as you’re leading, managing, going about your business is:

What are you focusing on when it comes to your business?
Are you focusing on what isn’t working and what the problems are?
Or, are you focusing on what is working and what you can build on?

And what I mean by that is: what we focus on, what we put our mental energy into, our emotional energy or thoughts into really becomes what the result is down the road. Sometimes you don’t realize that and you are asking yourself “how did we end up where we ended up a year ago?”

Well, where you ended up and where that all started was in your mindset, your thinking or what you’ve focused on. Remember to get clear about what the result is that you want in your business in this next year, and then focus intentionally daily on your decisions, your choices, the way you talk about your business, the way you interact with your business with that result in mind.

Don’t focus on what you don’t want, but focus on what you do want the business to manifest. Focus on the result that you want to get from the business. Whether that’s a financial return or a new product launch, maybe it’s a new store to be opened up, or whether or not to go online. It could be a myriad of things. But think about what your mental focus is, your mindset, the amount of energy that is going into what you want.

Because I think what you’ll find is if you really take inventory, a lot of us spend a lot of time on thinking about things or have a mindset focused on what we don’t want.

We need to turn that faucet off. Turn on the faucet of what you do want, what you want in the future, and thinking in your mindset around that as you go through the day in your business.

So, once again, thanks for reading. We’re at confidencecoach.org. Subscribe to our YouTube channel too. We’d love to talk to you about your mindset. And if you’d like some coaching, reach out to us for a catalytic conversation. Thanks.

by Scott Ballard , July 29, 2018

The Circle of Encouragement

The Circle of Encouragement is one of the things that we’ve been doing with clients when we work with them during The Dream Employee process. This is something you might want to do after a long strategy meeting, a coaching session, or a team meeting that you have on a regular basis. This will end a meeting on a different note and in a different way. We talked earlier about starting a meeting with wins (things that people are excited about), so now we want to give you a new strategy of how to end a meeting. This may be a real stretch for you, but it is going to create great culture, great collaboration, and unity within your company in a profound way.

This is something I learned taking teams all over the world – to Africa, India, Haiti on mission trips. I would gather the team at the end of every day, and we’d get in a circle. One at a time, we would turn to the person next to us and speak 30 or 60 seconds of encouragement to the person sitting beside us. We’d go around the circle one way and then go back the other way, so everybody got to be a receiver and a giver of encouragement. After doing this with about 30 different teams that I’ve taken out in the last 10 years, I’ve adapted it to business. We are now doing this with our people we are coaching, with their employees and employers at the end of the meeting or training session. We call this process the Circle of Encouragement.

Basically, it’s a very simple idea to do in your company. One person starts out and they turn to the person next to them and for 30 seconds they say all the things that they appreciate about that person in the work that they do within the company. Then that person turns to the person next to them and does the same. This process repeats itself and goes all the way around the circle. Then when you get to the beginning, it flips the other way around. Each person gets to speak and receive encouragement from the people on either side of them.

What this really does is it brings unity. It brings appreciation. It brings respect. It creates a culture where positive things are verbalized and people get to hear about the things that they’re doing well. This creates unity within the team. It also helps other people in the circle that maybe don’t work closely together get to know each other better and understand what each person really brings to the team. It’s a great value.

We like to do this to end a meeting instead of ending a meeting with “I’m overwhelmed because I’ve got 15 new things I’ve got to do”, or “I didn’t understand that”, or “that meeting didn’t go well”. The meeting begins with wins and ends well with encouragement. This is how you create a culture that is unstoppable. A culture that goes beyond just doing a job, but actually really doing a job with a group of people and a team that is all about seeing the best in one another.

We call this a Circle of Encouragement. We’re way out on the frontier of employee engagement and creating culture with some profound, but very simple things that we teach and help our leaders put into place in their business so that they can get the maximum result from each team member. Everybody in this day and age needs encouragement! And so we actually put it in the meeting agenda. We teach it; we do it with people. It’s uncomfortable at first. But when you see the result — people start receiving that encouragement — you see your whole culture just be transformed.

Here at Confidence Coach, that’s what we’re about – transforming cultures, making a working place for employees and for owners to be awesome. In order to be awesome, people have to feel encouraged and to feel like they’re winning. And this has to be done on a regular basis. This has to be something we do all the time.

Share this with people that could benefit from this. Let us know if you’d like to know how to do this, and we’d be glad to come in and show you how to do this either virtually or in person. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check us out on confidencecoach.org. There is a free 60 minute catalytic conversation if you’d like to talk about this area of employee engagement, employee retention, or how to improve the culture of your company. We’re passionate about it. We do this every day. We love what we do and we’d love to help you!

by Scott Ballard , July 22, 2018

Clarity – Vision for the Future

Today I wanted to talk to you about how you can use clarity and vision for the future to lead well as a business owner, CEO or entrepreneur. I’d like to give you an effective way to help you lead your team and/or your employees, as you go forward.

When we talk to employees, we have seen that one of the areas where they feel uncertainty or unrest, and they start procrastinating and maybe not performing at their highest level, is when they lack a clarity and a long-term vision from the owner, CEO, or entrepreneur. So if you haven’t talked about or let your employees know your vision in the last six months, one of the things that we’re helping our clients with is how to have what we call a “clarity” talk.

Here’s how to have a clarity talk: Get your group or team together and in about 15 or 20 minutes, give them the long vision of what you’re seeing and what your plans are; what the strategy is; where you’re going; what’s happening in the industry.

They need to hear this from you at least a couple of times a year. When you do this, what you find out is that all the uncertainty about the future and all the negativity that is coming at them (fear via social media, the news or maybe something happening in their own life), this will help dispel that a little bit. They will realize that you’re actually thinking, planning, and strategizing about the long-term future of your company and your business as it goes forward. This helps bring clarity to them; which brings confidence and courage, and then a willingness to invest even deeper into the work that they’re doing in your business.

We suggest that you really focus on this idea of giving a message of clarity that comes directly from you about the business, about their long-term future. Which for a lot of them, they’re looking at the company as their future vehicle to get them where they want to go. But if they don’t hear it from you on a consistent basis, their minds can wander. They can think that another company is a better opportunity because there’s more clarity about where they’re going, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and who’s doing what.

So that’s our tip for today. Bring clarity and leadership to your company by giving them this clarity/vision talk on a regular basis. Once again, if you found this valuable, let us know. If you’d like to know more about how to put a clarity talk like this on, we could give you the template to do that. Please subscribe to our Youtube channel, share this information, and we’re always available to do a free consultation with you if you’d like to know more about how we’re helping business owners and CEOs today.

by Scott Ballard , July 15, 2018

Unfair Recruiting Tactics

We are working with several companies right now and their number one challenge is onboarding or recruiting. They are trying to fill the empty spots that they have in their company and it’s becoming a huge issue. A client of ours was saying the other day that he has a candidate for a very important position. He met with him, they’ve done the interviews, and they know that this is the right person. But, the gentleman told him that he has two other offers and that he’s weighing, which is the best offer. The money’s about the same, the industries are the same and the company sizes are pretty equal. He said he didn’t know what else to do in order to get this guy to come to work for them and not one of their competitors. I asked him what he’d talked about. He said, he’d told him about how great the company was, the culture, that their company is like a family, and they’ve been in business a long time. This would be a great fit for him and he wouldn’t have to move.

But these are all the same things that every other company has been telling him. And so I said, why don’t we think about it from his point of view as a candidate that could really add a lot to your business? Why don’t you call him back in and once he’s sitting down, ask him these questions:

How could this position help you get what you want out of life?
What are your dreams, goals, aspirations?

Then spend a half hour talking about how your company can help him achieve those dreams, goals and aspirations.

And I said to him, if everything else is equal, but you’re actually talking about what he wants to do with his life, his personal dreams and goals for himself, his family, and find out what he wants out of life — once he sees that you care about that, you will have an unfair recruiting tactic that nobody else is using in your industry. Sure enough, that was the result. The guy came to work for him after they had that conversation.

If you’re also experiencing this zero unemployment environment, you need more people on your team, you’re finding recruiting much harder, and you’re finding that you have empty spots you’re recruiting to fill — try this approach and ask the recruits these questions. This will set you apart from your competition and enable you to get those key people into your company so that you can keep on the path of growth.

At Confidence Coach, we help business owners, CEOs, and entrepreneurs with the task of maximizing their greatest asset, which is their employees, their “first” customers. Part of doing this is you have to be a great recruiter, and part of being a great recruiter is not seeing it just from your side (the company’s side), but seeing it from the perspective of the potential candidate who could come in and help your company grow even further.

If this is helpful, please contact us or you can schedule a free catalytic conversation. Make it a great day!

by Scott Ballard , July 8, 2018

How Do You Get Extra Effort From Your Employees?

I just wanted to talk about how you can, in just one moment, get extra effort from your employees. You can get them to go the extra mile and consistently improve their performance.

You want to know the secret? It’s really not up to them. It’s up to you!

I challenge you to go around your business and see where your employees are working and what they’re doing. Go around with one focus and that is to look for what they’re doing right, what they’re doing well, and then acknowledge it. For example, tell them that you really appreciated the way they handled that customer situation or the way they processed an order, or maybe the way that they have kept their work area clean — or whatever it may be. You get the idea.

But the challenge that I’m throwing out to you today is to walk around your business and look at every employee and try to find the good things that they’re doing. Then the second step is to acknowledge it, to verbalize it such as, “Hey, I see what you’re doing here!”

It’s great and important to focus on what they’re doing right, well and good. Now this can be really challenging because for most of us, what we’re seeing all the time is what they’re not doing, what they’re doing wrong, the problems they have, and all those kind of things. But what I’m asking you to do over the next week is to every day get up from your desk and get away from your office. Go to where your employees are and acknowledge and look for the things that they’re doing right. Then, verbalize those right things to them. Don’t just think it in your own mind. Actually tell them and acknowledge them. Focus on what they’re doing well, what they’re doing right, and how great a job they are doing. You’ll be surprised how this changes the dynamic of your team and your employees. Have everybody in your organization do this as well!

Looking for the positive is something that we have to train our minds to do. But what we do here at Confidence Coach is we give you ideas, we give you processes and thoughts that help you get the greatest return out of your biggest investment (which is your employees — they are your “first” customer). Think about this and see how you can get the results that you want from your team.

If this is helpful, let us know. If you’d like to talk about coaching and hear about different programs and ideas that we have, please reach out to us and schedule a free catalytic conversation. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel or to our blog.

Remember, you have everything you need to be successful in your business with your employees right at your fingertips. All you need to do is to take action today.

by Scott Ballard , July 1, 2018