Harvey MacKay's Blog, page 12

Be Yourself, The Improve Yourself

I’ve always been fascinated by the Japanese carp otherwise known as the koi. It’s a fish with seemingly

unlimited growth potential. If you put the koi in a small fishbowl, it will grow to only be two or three inches long. In a larger tank or small pond, and it gets to be a foot and a half. But if the koi is placed in a large lake, where it can really stretch out, it can grow up to three feet long. The size of the fish is proportional to the size of its home.

Well, it works that way with people too. We grow according to the size of our world. Not physically, of course, but mentally. You too can be a mental giant!

Is it up to your supervisor to prepare you for a promotion? Maybe a little, but the real responsibility belongs much closer to home. You have to let your boss know that you’re always ready for a new challenge and will do whatever it takes to prepare. You want to be qualified before the next job opens up, not disappointed after. You want to be interesting at the office and after hours. You want to be interesting at the office and after hours. Your coworkers and friends can hear the same stores only so many times.

Grow. Stretch. Transform yourself.

A simple bar of iron is worth about $5. Made into horseshoes, the value rises to about $50. Transform it into needles, and now you’re talking about $500. But if you take that bar of iron and make it into springs for a Swiss watch, it could be worth a half-million bucks. You started with the same raw material; the value grew as the material was formed and developed.

It’s the same with people.

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Without a Goal, You’ll Never Score One | Setting Goals

I once heard a math teacher announce an unusual dream at a school assembly: “I hope you all fail.” he said to an audience of high school seniors eager to go out and conquer the world. “Because if you don’t, you haven’t set your goals high enough.”

Getting by without setting goals is the ultimate way to shortchange your life. It’s not a way to failure. It’s the definition of nonstarting.

Evangelist Robert H. Schuller describes four kinds of people:

First come the cop outs. These people set no goals and make no decisions.
Second are the hold-outs.  They have a beautiful dream, but unce

rtainly makes them afraid to respond to its challenge.
The dropouts are third.  They start to make their dream come true, but when the going gets tough, they quit.
Finally, there are the all-outs. These brave souls know where they’re headed and do what it takes to get there.

It all starts with goals: Winners make goals. Losers make excuses.

 

 

 

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The Confidence Game

For about six weeks every year, beginning in late December and continuing through early February, football fans get the ultimate fix: the college bowl games, the NFL play-offs and, finally, the Super Bowl. It’s also an annual refresher course in winning and losing that separates the champs from the also-rans.

For a moment, consider the losers in these annual contests. The also-rans work mighty hard to get to those games in the first place. What causes these exceptional teams to be eliminated?  Much of the reason can be traced to split-second breakdowns in what you might call the confidence game.

Legendary Alabama football coach Paul Bryant retired with 323 wins over 38 seasons.

“Bear” Bryant used to say that members of a winning team needed five things:

1.  Tell me what you expect from me.

2.  Give me an opportunity to perform.

3. Let me know how I’m doing.

4. Give me guidance when I need it.

5. Reward me according to my contributions.

Winners need straight information. Too often, you’ll hear salespeople complain they’re not getting a constant flow of confident support. Confidence is surely important. So is exact and clear direction at critical moments. When everything is on the line, make sure you’re listening for the right signals.

 

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Always Travel On the Ball | Business Travel Sales Tip

Every business trip you plan should have multiple agendas. Deals on the table may be the motive. Nourishing your network should never rank far behind.

Say you’re going to Omaha or Tampa for an industry event. On your list of 100 top customers, customers #14 and #37 are there. Can you squeeze in a visit? Do you know the name of the hottest restaurant in town should lunch prove doable?

Wedge in opportunities to visit promising, though not top-of-the-list, prospects. That’s often how second-tier customers morph into the first tier.

By the way, before you land in Omaha or Tampa, reach for more than that breath mint. Surf Omaha.com (with news from The Omaha-World Herald) or TBO.com (with stories from The Tampa Tribune). You’ll be electrifying with the the local buzz.

 

 

 

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Increase Your Productivity

Guest blog post from Tom Hopkins, Bestselling Author of How to Master the Art of Selling

———

We all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. That is a limitation of our existence. So, the only way to achieve more success with the time you have is to make that time more productive. Over the years, I’ve found it so helpful to invest a few minutes at the end of each week to think about how I could have been more productive. The realizations that have come to me have truly made my life and my business better.

I was fortunate early in my sales career to take some advice to heart. The advice was that “poor people should take rich people to lunch – and listen.” Since the results of my real estate career at that point in time would definitely fall under the “poor” category, I started paying attention to who was doing better than I was. There was a man in business in my community who everyone looked up to because of his great success. I decided I would take him to lunch.

It took several attempts but my persistence paid off and he finally agreed to meet me for lunch. I had chosen a nice restaurant, and was so nervous that I was afraid to pick up my water glass for fear of spilling it all over myself. I hadn’t prepared well and didn’t even know where to begin with asking him questions. After a few minutes, he asked me why I wanted to meet with him. When I told him about the advice I had been given he asked if I was serious about wanting to achieve success. I seem to recall my voice cracking as I replied “yes.”

He leaned back in his chair for a moment, looking at me. Then he said, “Tom, I’m going to give you the best advice I’ve ever received. I’ve applied this advice to everything – my business, my family life, everything. I apply it every day, too – not just when I feel like it. Some days you’ll love me for giving you this advice. Other days you’ll wish you’d never heard it but it will always work for you.” I was so excited that he would help me this way. I started looking for something to write on. As a young, inexperienced businessperson I had failed to bring pen and paper. The restaurant had cloth napkins and I was afraid I would forget this precious advice. Then, the man leaned forward, looked me straight in the eye, and said twelve words that changed my life forever. I’ll share those words with you now: “I must do the most productive thing possible at every given moment.”

I was shocked. It sounded so simple. Could true success be gained just from being productive? Well, let me tell you it can. I have lived by those words ever since the day I heard them. And let me also tell you that it’s not always easy to follow that advice. There were times when I wanted to linger in bed rather than getting on my exercise bike. There were days when playing golf sounded a lot more fun than going into the office. But when I acted on that advice, I had better days and achieved greater success.

Please understand that living by this advice is not meant to turn you into a workaholic. Is playing on the beach with your loved ones a productive use of your time? Of course it is – when the money for the vacation has been earned. Is being present at your children’s sporting events productive? You bet it is.

Take those twelve words and start asking yourself, “Is what I’m doing right now productive as to achieving my goals?” If it’s not, make a choice and conscious effort to change what you’re doing to “the most productive thing possible.” You’ll start achieving both more balance and more success in your life.

To read more success tips and get access to 9 Free Selling Skills Videos from Tom Hopkins visit www.tomhopkins.com/blog.

 

 

 

 

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Getting a Job is a Job – My Advice to College Graduates

Audio Podcast: Advice for College Graduates – MP3 (click image)

Looking for a job? Get a routine and stick to it.

Getting a job is not a nine-to-five job. It’s a sixteen-an-hour-a-day proposition, from the moment you get up until the moment you go to sleep. With that kind of workload, you need a daily schedule to manage that routine and organize your time. No employer is around to police your time management, and that means the control burden falls squarely on your own shoulders. This doesn’t mean you’re being sentenced to endless rounds of self-punishment and drudgery. If you’re going to be at your best, you’ve got to have some fun too, so make room for a little downtime.

Start the week unofficially on Sunday night. You’ll want to scribble out a short list of things to get done the next week and check it against the list you had the previous week.

Set goals. To put them to work for you they must be:

Measurable

Identifiable

Documented

Attainable

Specific

And they need to be examined regularly.

Note the first letter of each word spells Midas, and I call this approach giving goals The Midas touch because it turns goals into gold.

How many new contacts did I make this last week? Did I stretch our geographically into new areas? Explore new job descriptions? Improve my presentation or appearance? Grade yourself, and don’t be too narrowly focused. A week without getting a job is not a week of failure. You may have accomplished other goals last week, things you’ve never had the time for or put in the effort to achieve in the past.

Think of what you are doing as a new do-it-yourself skill, like crafting a fine piece of woodworking or raising and grooming a bonsai plant. Why? Because you are going to need to use the same job-finding skill set twelve to fifteen times in your working life. You can and will become an expert at it. So good and efficient, in fact, that you will be able to methodically get a new job in your off-hours while you actually have one during the work day.

For my straight forward advice for college graduates click here for my 11 minute audio podcast. 

Mackay’s Moral: It bears repeating: Getting a job is a job.

 

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Positive Energy Is a Chain Reaction

Photo Source: Wikipedia

Gordon Dean was a distinguished American lawyer and prosecutor. One of the original members of the Atomic Energy Commission, he became its chairman from 1950 to 1953. It’s said that when Dean died in a plane crash in 1958, among his personal efforts was an envelope with nine life lessons scribbled on the back. These lessons aren’t about the law or about atomic energy. They’re wisdom about his philosophy of life:

Never lose your capacity for enthusiasm. 
Never lose your capacity for indignation. 
Never judge people – don’t type them too quickly. But in a pinch never first assume that a man is bad; first assume that he is good and that, at worst, he is in the gray area between bad and good. 
If you can’t be generous when it’s hard to be, you won’t be when it’s easy. 
The greatest builder of confidence is the ability to do something – almost anything – well. 
When confidence comes, then strive for humility; you aren’t as good as all that. 
The way to become truly useful is to seek the best that other brains have to offer. Use them to supplement your own, and be prepared to give credit to them when they have helped. 
The greatest tragedies in the world and personal events stem from misunderstandings. So communicate! 

We’re all students of life. Want to get a head of the class? Pay attention and take notes. 

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The Principal of it All

Things are not necessarily as we always perceive them to be. 

Example: A mother is in the kitchen. She hollers upstairs to her son, who is still in bed. “You are late for school. Get down here right now.”

The son hollers back, “I don’t want to go to school. The kids don’t like me. The teachers don’t like me. Everyone talks behind my back. I’m not going to school.”

The mother rushes upstairs, opens the bedroom door, points to her son and says, “You get out of bed this very minute. You are going to school for two reasons:

1. You are 41 years old.

2. You’re the principal of the school.

 

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You Are What You Read

 

You can’t make a connection with someone if you have nothing to talk about.

I have one simple tip to make so you are never at a loss: Get yourself a subscription to Sunday New York Times.

For a shy person or for someone who worries about running out of things to say, there is no better resource than the Sunday edition of “The Newspaper of Record.” 

It’s an encyclopedia of the week’s events.
The movie and book reviews alone are worth the price of the paper.
If you ever have a talk intelligently about science, travel, sports, politics, or whatever, it’s the right there.

Oh, yes, the networking part.

They tell me that all the yuppies who summer at Martha’s Vineyard line up at the dock every Sunday morning waiting for the ferry to unload its precious cargo of newspapers. You could be in a lot worse company.

 

Mackay’s Maxim: Reading the Sunday Times is your ticket of admission to any conversation. 

 

Click here to read more networking tips from Harvey Mackay. 

 

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The Mother of All Questions

 

Have you ever wondered about questions to ask a job candidate?

In August 2009, John Chambers, the CEO of IT giant Cisco, was interviewed by the New York Times. He was asked to share the questions he asked a job candidate. His most interesting one:

“Who are the best people you recruited and developed and where are they today?”

Everyone gives lip serive to people being the biggest resource for business. Who doesn’t sing the praises of smart hiring and management development?

Chambers is saying prove it. This challenge works for any level of management in any company.

Does Chambers’ question apply to young people who are entering the job market?  Why shouldn’t it? If you ran the student newspaper or the debating society, how did you help develop the next editor or the chief debater who succeeded you?

If your next job interviewer doesn’t ask you the Chambers question, and you have had stellar results in finding and growing people, make it a major selling point. And if you don’t have a meaningful answer to the question, then make your own recruitment and development skills a #1 priority when you  land your next job.

The people who build companies are the people who build people.

 

 

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