It's time to connect all the pieces of your business investment puzzle!
“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” Theodore Roosevelt
So, we’ve spent just over two weeks now reviewing your business investment on EVERY level: intellectual, emotional and financial. Today, we’ll chat about where the rubber meets the road: the point where they all converge.
It’s not at Starbucks or the grocery store.
It’s your every day business practices.
You, dear reader, are a veritable balancing act! You’re pretty much an expert juggler, yet it’s likely no one’s ever called you that. You’re an unstoppable machine when it comes to your business investment…but you know what? You can do better. We all can! And it’s not even as difficult as it might sound at first.
I’ll be honest with you: there are things I do better than others in my business. But just because I don’t do some things as well as others doesn’t mean they’re not important or I don’t get credit for trying. The key to building a better business investment is what we’ve gone over these past two weeks: identifying your intellectual, emotional and financial investments and seeing what we can do better.
Some of you have realized that you could be spending your money in different places. Others have realized that you need a colleague to bounce ideas off of, and I’ll bet one or seven of you have noticed that you’re not truly monetizing your intellectual investment to its full potential. This convergence is where we can all do better. And sometimes, we need some help.
I’m lucky that my career as an executive coach lets me work with people seeking to balance this convergence each and every day. And we ALL need help creating that balance. Here are some examples:
- Great with making money but NOT great at managing it? A virtual assistant and CPA can help keep you in line.
- Great with balancing the bank account but NOT so at client goodwill? A part-time assistant could make follow-up and thank you calls for you, as well as manage your email campaigns to stay in touch.
- Is your family vacation the same weekend as a great conference you want to attend? Split the cost with a friend or colleague and attend “virtually” for half price! R&R and education – easy.
Now, here’s your action task for today: make a list of places in your business (and personal) life you’d like to add more balance. On Tuesday, we’re going to talk about how to get the help you need so you can do the things you love doing each and every day. Make it a great weekend!
What are you investing in your business emotionally?
We’re getting quite a bit of mileage out of the list we made over a week ago, aren’t we? If you happened to miss the first three installments of my “The Best Business Investment You Can Make” series, here’s the links so you can find them with ease:
Installment 1
Installment 2
Installment 3
Now, today we’re digging into our emotional investments in our business model. WE can’t help it but to be emotionally invested in our businesses. If we aren’t, well…we should get out there and find something else to to already! Our emotional investment in our business is what allows us to tap into our intellectual investment and use it to its highest potential.
On that list we made last week, I asked you to fill it with how you feel about your business. When things go right, when things go wrong…we feel something, right? So you highlighted that list, and those highlights represent everything you wanted MORE of in your business. Things you wanted to feel MORE. More frequently, more intensely. Have a look at those highlighted items.
I’ll bet you they’re all pretty wonderful things, aren’t they? Of course they are. Nobody wants to feel more fear or insecurity when it comes to pursuing their passion! Highlighting those good things puts you in the right mindset to create more of them. When we preoccupy ourselves by focusing on all the things that weigh our minds down in business, we don’t give ourselves room to prosper. We take all of the energy that could be used to generate more of that good stuff and simply…waste it. We waste it worrying and complaining. There’s nothing good about either one.
To maximize your emotional investment in your business, you need to focus on the upside. Sure, stuff happens. It always will. But when you focus on what you want more of, it’ll come. It’ll make next Tuesday’s discussion about your financial investment even easier since you’ll put in motion a plan.
The plan, you ask? Well, today, you’re going to make a list of all the highlighted things you want more of in your business. Then, you’re going to put them in an envelope and hang them on your refrigerator. We spend a lot of time in front of the fridge, so you’ll have to see that envelope of goodness every time you grab a drink or snack. We should remind ourselves of the good things more often!
Have a great weekend and we’ll see you next Tuesday for Step 5!
Fairy tales. As we get older and life shows us what it truly holds around each bend, we begin to lose our faith that somewhere, sometime, there’s a fairy tale waiting for us.
Princes and princesses disappear and we see the monsters in the moat, the fire-breathing dragons. Well, we see everything that keeps us from getting where we need to go.
You know what I love about fairy tales? Everything. The beginning, middle and end, every trial and tribulation in between! Aside from imagining myself all dressed-up in corseted gowns and waving to my prince from a tower’s window, I think fairy tales have quite a bit to teach us about business. If only we’d listen.
I want to share three things that I’ve learned about being a woman in business from all those fairy tales of my childhood. Now, this doesn’t mean that the guys can’t share in these thoughts, but I’m a girl and I’m talking to my fellow princesses today!
Hire a Contractor: Remember the Three Little Pigs? That nasty wolf kept huffing and puffing and blowing their house down. This goes to show that do-it-yourself isn’t necessarily the best defense against the things you want to keep at bay in your business. Whether competition or an afternoon rainstorm, team up with those who know how to build what you need – and it’s most likely not one of the other two little piggies under your roof! (Tip: search for woman-owned general contractors and businesses if you want to keep it with the sisterhood!)
Watch What You Eat: If you want to end up in an oven like Hansel and Gretel, go ahead an gobble-up anything that’s put in front of you just because it looks tasty. There are a lot of people in the business world that prey on your desire to grow and prosper and they’ll sell you a bill of goods because you’re hungry. Do your homework, read the fine print and get referrals for those business snacks you’re about to eat. It doesn’t all taste as good as it looks!
Dreams Can Come True: Your glass slipper, your happily ever after – it’s all possible as a woman in business. There’s no “man” keeping you down and to be quite honest, if you find a fire-breathing dragon keeping you from your goals, I want you to email me a picture. Whatever you aspire to can become your day to day. Grab a white horse and a killer dress and go get that new client, small business loan or fantastic new logo design. You deserve it and if you envision it, you can have it.
How do you find the middle ground in work-life balance?
Is work-life balance really a myth? Every now and then, I pop over and read the fabulous musings of Cali Yost. She’s an expert blogger on the work-life subject for Fast Company and hosts her own site at the Flex+Strategy Group. I like Cali’s content. And I agree with her: work-life BALANCE is something of a myth. She prefers the phrase “work-life fit.”
Fit. I like that. After all, have we ever, for a single day, truly had “balance” in our lives?
Corporations preach it in their recruiting materials and employee benefits books. Day cares and preschools offer to help us out with it. But if I concede that there’s not really a balance and it’s more of a “fit,” then I think we’re well on our way to making some progress in these days that we live that are brimming with non-stop activity.
It’s pretty simple to see when things are off-kilter: we stay at the office too late, answer emails at odd hours from our smart phones and our voicemail inboxes fill up like the laundry basket.
I put together three tips that you can start using TODAY to make your work-life balance a bit more balanced. Put on your life like it fits and stop trying to button that top button when you had the extra helping of your neighbor’s awesome potato salad at the picnic last night!
Work-Life Balance Tip #1: Take Lunch
Yes, I’m crazy. And I’m telling you to take lunch. Whether you work from home or in an office, step away from your work domain for a minimum of thirty minutes. Stop scheduling conference calls during lunch. Don’t answer your phone. Don’t respond to emails. Unplug – and see how much easier it is to plug back in.
Work-Life Balance Tip #2: Hard Stops
Not unlike taking lunch, give yourself a “hard stop” at least two days a week. This means that at 5 P.M. (or whatever time you determine), you call it a day. Not five minutes later and no excuses. Go DO SOMETHING (and enjoy it). Your inbox will still be there in the morning (and your family and friends will thank you).
Work-Life Balance Tip #3: Ask for Help
If you’re simply afraid that you can’t get everything done and the act of trying is what’s putting you off-kilter, ask for help. Hire a virtual assistant, a house cleaner or one of your teenagers to do some of the running around.
Whatever the solution, asking for help doesn’t have to be expensive or worst of all, humiliating. It can be empowering and free you up to do the things you both need and want to! Take a tip from one of my previous entries on how to offer support. It’s easier to lend and GIVE support than you might think!
I just love doing things wrong!
I really do love being wrong. I relish it, I wait for it and embrace it every time it walks into my life. I greet Wrong with a smile and if it were possible, I’d buy it a mimosa at Sunday brunch. Now, I don’t go out of my way to BE wrong, mind you, but when Wrong shows up at my door, I don’t look through the peephole and pretend I’m not home.
Over the years, I’ve discovered a certain power in being wrong. Remember when we were kids – teenagers, even. We couldn’t imagine not being 100% right all of the time! If anyone told us we were wrong, well, they were just…WRONG. I don’t know about you, but as I traveled through Life’s School of Hard Knocks, I came to realize something:
Wrong is Right.
When you open the door to being wrong, you find new ways to be right. That’s reason number one I love being wrong.
Reason number two is this: when you’re wrong, you can try again. Being wrong is life’s little mulligan. A do-over. And half the time, the work is already done for you when you’re wrong (because someone’s done it right and all you have to do is catch-up). Now, I’m not advocating you don’t look both ways before crossing the street, but there aren’t many types of wrong that aren’t recoverable. I love the do-over.
The third reason I love being wrong? That’s easy: I love learning. If I could be wrong about something every day and have a new Right presented to me, I’m living right. Whether it’s business, a conversation with a friend or a quandary at the grocery store, being wrong gives me the chance to emerge better on the other side. And I can learn how to not make the same mistake again.
Now that you know why I love being wrong, why do YOU love being wrong? What does it bring to your life and what do you learn? Go out and hug a Wrong today – you need them (and they need you)!
