A Sense of Alignment

Your most important aim in life is to be happy, to be calm, confident and relaxed and to feel in complete control of every aspect of your life. Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals and values are in alignment.

Nature demands balance in all things. You see balance all around you, from the most distant stars in the universe down to the individual cells of your body. Each of your billions of cells contains hundreds of chemicals, each of which is carefully regulated and kept in balance by your autonomic nervous system to ensure your health and longevity.

The wonderful thing is that balance is the norm in your life. Your body has a natural bias toward health and energy. It’s built to last for a hundred years and to perform smoothly and efficiently for most of that time. It’s only improper maintenance and incorrect operation that, in most cases, cause your body to get out of balance and lead to disease and pain, rather than ease and pleasure.

Emotionally, you also have a natural bias toward happiness and enjoyment. In fact, you have a natural barometer inside of you that tells you when you’re doing the things that are just right for your unique personality and temperament. This is your inner voice, your intuition, and it’s manifested in your level of peace of mind. Whenever you feel at peace with yourself and the world around you, you know that you’re doing the very things that you’re meant to do and that your inner and outer worlds are properly balanced and in alignment with each other.

There are two major areas of balance that you need to be concerned with on a daily basis. They are the physical and the emotional. You need to adjust your behaviors in such a way that you enjoy high levels of physical health and energy most of the time. Even the richest person in the world is at a tremendous disadvantage if he loses his health. You need to guard your health like a sacred object. From the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night, you need to think about the things you can do to assure that you live a long, healthy life, free from the diseases and the debilitating illnesses that are causing our health-care outlays to be the highest in the world.

A study was conducted over a period of 20 years on 8,000 men to determine what physical habits they had that caused them to live longer lives or caused them to die earlier than their peers. This study, The Alameda County Study, discovered that there were seven common habits practiced regularly by the people who seemed to be the healthiest, live the longest and have the fewest sick days per year. The first of these seven habits is eating regularly. Researchers found that people who ate irregularly, at different times and in different amounts throughout the day, were far more likely to be fatigued and have physical ailments than were those who ate on a regular basis.

The second habit is eating lightly. We know today that foods high in fat, sugar and salt are very bad for us. The more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean sources of protein you incorporate into your diet, the better you will feel, the deeper you will sleep, the fresher you will be and the better your whole life will be.

The third habit, which also involves diet, is not snacking between meals. The researchers found that when a person eats snacks between meals, the introduction of new food interrupts the ongoing digestive process and leads to drowsiness and improper digestion.

The fourth habit for longevity is not smoking. Smoking is so detrimental to the entire human system that it alone causes more illnesses than all the other environmental or hereditary factors put together. Researchers have identified at least 32 forms of illness, including a variety of cancers, that are caused by or aggravated in some way by smoking. The very act of quitting smoking can do more to improve a person’s overall health than a change in any other single health habit.

The fifth habit identified in the Alameda study is consuming alcohol moderately. This is a fairly narrow range that suggests not more than one or two drinks per day, and fewer is desirable. Since the number one cause of premature death up to the age of 40 is automobile accidents, and as many as 50 percent of automobile accidents are alcohol-related, this is a good piece of advice.

The sixth habit for longevity is sleeping seven to eight hours every night. Keeping yourself properly rested is one of the most important things you can do. If you allow yourself to become overtired for any period at all, your immune system begins to break down, and you become susceptible to a variety of illnesses, including colds, flu and even pneumonia. Getting regular rest is one of the most important things you can do to keep your physical life balanced.

The seventh habit identified in the Alameda study is exercising regularly. The rule with regard to your body is “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” Regular exercise, even moderate exercise, can have a tremendous impact in helping you to feel better, digest better, sleep better and be a happier and more positive person.

Since the Alameda study was completed, insurance companies have identified two additional habits: first, wearing automobile seat belts, to reduce the possibility of harm in an automobile accident; and, second, deep breathing each day, to improve your digestion, increase the amount of oxygen going through your brain, and enable you to relax into a “state of alpha” on a regular basis.

One of the very best ways to engage in the process of “centering” is to take a few moments prior to any event of importance to breathe deeply six or seven times. Deep breathing causes you to relax and makes you feel more confident and more in control of yourself and the situation. It brings your inner world into better alignment with what is going on around you.

In fact, whenever you face a stressful situation, you can better prepare yourself to deal with it by taking a few moments to breathe deeply before you say or do anything. When you prepare yourself in this way, your words and actions will be far more effective than they would if you had just reacted when the situation came up. You will feel more in balance. And the more you act as though you are in balance, the more it becomes a habit for you to behave in a balanced way.

Vince Lombardi once said, “Fatigue does make cowards of us all.” When you are physically out of balance for any reason, when you are tired or you have eaten too much, or too much of the wrong foods, your emotions, your level of energy and your reactions to the various situations around you are adversely affected. When you are in excellent health, well rested, properly exercised and properly fed, you tend to perform at your best.

The second area of balance that is important to you is your emotional life. We know that how you feel emotionally has a dramatic impact on your physical body. The field of psychosomatic medicine deals with the impact of psycho-, the mind, on soma, the body; according to studies in this area, 80 to 90 percent of all your physical illnesses are mentally and emotionally caused.

How can you tell if you are out of balance emotionally? it’s easy. Just listen to your body and your emotions. Like a doctor, take a stethoscope to your life and listen intently to how you feel about how things are going on around you. When you are in balance, you feel calm, confident, relaxed, poised and at peace with yourself and life. When you are out of balance, you feel unhappy, stressed, anxious, angry, resentful, negative, pessimistic and depressed.

In each area of your life, you will have a different set of feelings. In some parts of your life, you will be perfectly happy. In other parts of your life, you will feel uneasy, tense and sometimes frustrated. Your job is to go through your life, like going through your closet to weed through old clothes, and take the time to develop a strategy to deal with each part of your life that is detracting from your happiness.

The most important breakthrough in psychology in the 20th century may have been the discovery of the self-concept. You have a self-concept, as does everyone else. This self-concept is the master program of your personal computer. it’s made up of all the ideas, experiences, decisions, emotions, knowledge and beliefs that you’ve developed from infancy, and possibly from even before that. This self-concept forms the operating instructions for your computer, and you always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with your self-concept on the inside.

You cannot change anything in your outer world permanently unless you first change your self-concept. You have a self-concept for the kind of person you are, for your personality and your attitude and your values. You have a self-concept for the kind of life you lead, for your income, your home, your car and the type of work that you do. You have a self-concept for your health and your weight and your level of fitness, for how well you perform in any athletic endeavor. You have a self-concept that governs your level of creativity, intelligence, sense of humor, memory, ability to speak to a public audience and level of competence in everything else that you do. And you always act on the outside consistent with this self-concept. To get your life into greater balance, it’s essential that you examine your inner world in relation to your outer world; compare both worlds to find where there is incongruence or imbalance that might be causing you to perform poorly or, more importantly, to be unhappy and frustrated.

Your self-concept is made up of three parts. The first part is your self-ideal. This is the person you would most like to be. This is a description of the values that you feel are the highest you can have and live by. Your self-ideal is made up of a combination of all the qualities that you most admire in yourself and in other people. Sometimes, you can define your self-ideal by asking yourself what you would look like, and how you would be described by others, if you developed yourself into the finest human being you could ever become.

The second part of your self-concept is your self-image. Your self-image can be defined as the way you see yourself in the present moment. Your self-image is a combination of how you see yourself, how others see you and how you think others see you. All three may be different. That is, you may see yourself in a certain way, you may think others see you in a different way, and, then, others may see you differently from your perceptions.

You always perform on the outside consistent with the mental picture that you have of yourself on the inside. If you see yourself as positive and happy and confident, competent and capable in your personal life and your work, you’ll behave like that on the outside, toward other people. You can always tell what your self-image is, in any area of your life, by examining how you feel when you’re with people. A person with a positive self-image is relaxed and confident with others. A person with a negative self-image feels insecure and inferior with others, especially with people he feels are ahead of him or better than him in some way.

Now, here’s the interesting thing about your self-image. When your self-image is fully integrated, the way you see yourself, the way others see you and the way you think others see you all are the same. And the more you’re living your life consistent with your values and ideals, the more integrated your self-image is, and the better you perform at everything you attempt.

The third part of your self-concept is your self-esteem. Your self-esteem can be defined as how much you like yourself and respect yourself. it’s your reputation with yourself. it’s how you think about yourself relative to the world when you’re in the privacy of your room. it’s the emotional component of your self-concept and is more important than anything else.

Your level of self-esteem determines your personality, your level of stress, how much enthusiasm and excitement you have in life, how happy you are, how positive you are, and how well you get along with people. Psychologists today have come to the overwhelming conclusion that your self-esteem is the real measure and monitor of your personality and largely determines everything that happens to you in your interactions and relationships with others.

And what is the key to high self-esteem? The key is simply this: When your external behaviors and your highest values and ideals are consistent with each other, your self-esteem goes up. When your ideals and values are clear, and when the qualities and behaviors that you most admire are the same qualities and behaviors that you manifest in your interactions with others, you like yourself better. You respect yourself more. You feel happier.

Whenever your inner world and your outer world are in alignment, whenever your activities and your values are congruent, whenever your activities are in balance with the highest values that you hold, you feel terrific and perfectly centered in your life.

If you say and do one thing while you admire and respect another set of behaviors, you feel unhappy and dissatisfied. You feel out of balance. You feel a sense of incongruency.

it’s not easy to attain a sense of balance and equilibrium. It requires effort on your part. It requires that you think through who you are and who you want to be. It requires that you take the necessary steps to do more of the things that are consistent with the actions of the very best person that you can imagine yourself becoming, and that you simultaneously stop doing and saying the things that are inconsistent with your best ideals and aspirations.

You achieve a greater sense of balance by, first of all, determining your values in each area, in regard to your health, your relationships, your work, and so on. Next, you examine your behaviors and identify the things that you’re doing and saying that are not consistent with those values. And then you resolve to change them, one by one. In bringing your behaviors into alignment with your innermost convictions, you start to feel wonderful about yourself; you start to feel more in balance; you start to feel happier and healthier.

Just as a car with perfectly aligned and balanced wheels runs more smoothly down the highway, you also will run more smoothly down the highway of your life when you’ve taken the time and made the effort to bring everything that you do and say into balance and alignment.

Develop a Prosperity Consciousness

The starting point of all riches is the development of a prosperity consciousness. You must become a financial success in your thinking long before you achieve it in your reality. Both poverty and riches are the result of a state of mind, and the most important single step you ever take on the road to wealth and financial independence is the decision to change your thinking, to impress into your mind an unshakable belief that you can and will achieve your financial goals. This must happen before anything else happens.

When I was growing up, I was fascinated by stories of successful men and women and how they made and lost their fortunes, and then made them over again. I read about the importance of a prosperity consciousness in the book, Think And Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, several times. But I never fully understood what it meant until about five years ago. Then it hit me and I’ve never been quite the same since. Every aspect of my life has improved dramatically, especially in the area of accumulating wealth, since I finally understood what it meant by a prosperity consciousness.

Here are two of the most exciting principles ever discovered in the long search by mankind for the secrets of health, happiness and great personal wealth.

The first principle is this. All causation is mental. All causation is mental. That means that everything that you are or ever will be will be as a result of how you use your mind. You are merely a mind with a body to carry it around with. The entire man made world that you see is simply an expression of thought. Your entire life is an expression of your own thinking. And since the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life, if you improve the quality of your thinking, you must, you will, inevitably improve the quality of your life.

The second principle is what we call the law of expectations. This law says that whatever you expect with confidence, positive or negative, becomes your reality. If you confidently expect to succeed, if you confidently expect to learn something from every experience, if you confidently expect to become wealthy as a result of applying your talents and abilities to your opportunities and you maintain that attitude of confident expectations long enough, it will become your reality. It will give you a positive optimistic cheerful attitude that will cause people to want to help you, and will cause things to happen the way you want them to happen.

Here are two things you can do immediately to practice these principles in your day to day life:

First, start thinking today in a positive, optimistic, confident way about personal and financial success. Continually imagine what differences it would make in your life if you were financially independent. This is the starting point of developing a prosperity consciousness.

Second, develop your own attitude of positive expectations. Look for the good in every situation. Look for the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty. Be positive and cheerful about everything that happens and you will be amazed at the difference it makes in your life.

Be A Doctor of Selling

Top sales professionals see themselves as “Doctors of Selling.” They see themselves as professionals, well educated, acting in their “patient’s” best interest, and bound by a high code of ethics.

The medical process is the same everywhere. Whenever you go to any doctor, of any kind, for any condition, he will follow the three part sequence of examination, diagnosis and prescription. Just as a medical professional would never think of treating you without following these three steps in order, you as a doctor of selling, would never allow a customer to force you to sell without your going through your three stages as well.

This is as applicable to selling magazines door-to-door as it is to selling oil tankers to Exxon. In the examination phase, you ask excellent questions, carefully prepared, in sequence, which are geared to give you a thorough knowledge of the patient’s condition, or the customer’s situation.

The second phase is that of diagnosis. In the diagnosis with a customer, you would repeat back the results of your examination and double check to be sure that the symptoms that you had detected were the real symptoms being experienced by the patient.

You would ask additional questions to confirm and corroborate. You and the patient would mutually agree that this diagnosis seems to be an accurate description of the condition or problem. Once this mutual agreement has been reached, that a treatable condition exists and that you have identified it accurately, you can move on to phase three.

This is the prescription phase, where you show the patient (customer) that your product or service is the best available treatment, taking all the factors of the patient’s situation into consideration for the ailment that you have diagnosed. You show that, on balance, what you are suggesting is the best of all possible solutions.

Professionals who sell in the way that doctors treat patients find that their sales activities proceed far more smoothly and result in better sales in less time. Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, take the time to do a thorough examination by asking excellent questions and by listening carefully to the answers. Second, repeat back and check your diagnosis with the customer so that you both agree on the need or problem — before you recommend a solution.

A Balanced Life

According to psychologist Sidney Jourard, fully 85 percent of your happiness in life will come from your personal relationships. Your interactions and the time that you spend with the people you care about will be the major source of the pleasure, enjoyment and satisfaction that you derive daily. The other 15 percent of your happiness will come from your accomplishments. Unfortunately, many people lose sight of what is truly important, and they allow the tail to wag the dog. They sacrifice their relationships, their major source of happiness, to accomplish more in their careers. But one’s career, at best, can be only a minor source and a temporary one, at that of the happiness and satisfaction that everyone wants.

There is no perfect answer to the key question of how to achieve balance in our lives, but there are a number of ideas that can help you to be and have and do more in the areas that are important to you. These ideas often require changes and modifications in the way you think and use your time, but the price is well worth it. You will find that by reorganizing your life in little ways, you can create an existence that gives you the highest quality and quantity of satisfaction overall. And this must be your guiding purpose. The ancient Greeks had two famous sayings: “Man, know thyself” and “Moderation in all things.” Taken together, those two ideas are a good starting point for achieving the balance that you desire. With regard to knowing thyself, it is very important to give some serious thought to what you really value in life. All trade-offs and choices are based on your values, and all stress and unhappiness come from believing and valuing one thing and, yet, finding yourself doing another. Only when your values and your activities are congruent do you feel happy and at peace with yourself.

So knowing yourself means knowing what you really value, knowing what is really important to you. The superior man or woman decides what is right before he or she decides what is possible. The advanced human being organizes his or her life to assure that everything that he or she is doing is consistent with his or her true values. It is essential for you to organize your life around yourself, rather than to organize yourself around the demands of your external world.

The second quote, “Moderation in all things,” is a wonderful and important dictate for successful living. But, at the same time, you know that you can’t really be successful in any area by being moderate in that area. Peter Drucker once wrote, “Wherever you find something getting done, you find a monomaniac with a mission.” You know that single-minded concentration on a goal or objective is absolutely necessary for achievement of any kind in a competitive society.

So what’s the solution? Over the years, I have worked with tens of thousands of men and women who have spent a lot of time and effort struggling to achieve balance in their lives. I have found that there is a simple formula; it is simple in that it is easy to explain, but you need tremendous self-discipline and persistence to implement it in your life.

The formula revolves around a concept of time management, or what you might want to call life management. Time management is really a form of personal management in which you organize your 24 hours a day in such a way that they give you the greatest possible return of happiness and contentment.

The key to time management, after you have determined your values and the goals that are in harmony with those values, is to set both priorities and posteriorities. The importance of setting priorities is obvious. You make a list of all the things that you can possibly do and then select from that list the things that are most important to you based on everything you know about yourself, about others and about your responsibilities. The setting of posteriorities is often overlooked. It is when you carefully decide which things you are going to stop doing so that you will have enough time to start doing something else.

The greatest single shortage we experience in America today is that of time. We suffer from what has been called “time poverty.” Men and women everywhere feel that their biggest single challenge is that they simply do not have enough time to do all the things that they have to do or want to do. People today feel pressured from all sides and are under an inordinate amount of stress. They feel overworked, fatigued and incapable of fulfilling all the responsibilities that they have taken on.

The starting point to alleviate this time poverty is to stop and think. Most people are so busy rushing back and forth that they seldom take the time to think seriously about who they are and why they are doing what they are doing. They engage in frantic activity, instead of thoughtful analysis. They get so busy climbing the ladder of success that they lose sight of the fact that the ladder may be leaning against the wrong building.

When my wife, Barbara, and I started our family, we were faced with a common dilemma: how can we balance the demands of work and home with the finite amount of time we are all given?

Here’s the answer I discovered: The key to success in a busy society is to devote your time to only two areas during the period of time when your family needs you, when your children are between the ages of birth to about 18 to 20 years. During this period of time, you need to curtail virtually all of your outside activities. You need to focus on two major areas your family and your career as I have done over the years. You need to place your family’s needs above all else and then organize your work schedule so that you can satisfy those needs on a regular basis. Then, when you work, you must concentrate single-mindedly on doing an excellent job.

Most people are time wasters. They waste their own time, and they waste your time as well. To be successful and happy, you must discipline yourself to work all the time you work. The average employee works at about 50 percent of capacity. Fully 80 percent of people working today are underemployed in that their jobs do not really demand their full capacities. Only 5 percent of workers surveyed recently felt that they were working at the outside limits of their potentials.

But this is not for you. You must resolve to work all the time you work. You must decide that from the time you start in the morning until the time you finish in the evening, you will work 100 percent of the time. Even if no one is watching you, you should be aware that everyone is watching you. Everybody knows everything. In every company, everyone knows who is working and who is not. Your job must be to work all the time you work. If people come by and want to chat, you simply smile at them and say, “Could we talk about this later?” Tell them that you have to get back to work.

Have a written list, and work on your list every day. Write down everything as it comes up, and add it to your list. Set priorities on your time, and be certain that you are working on the things that are most important to your boss and to your company. Refuse to get drawn into the time-wasting activities of the people around you. Work all the time you work.

Remember that to be successful, you must become a monomaniac with a mission. This is true today, and it has always been true in our competitive society. To be successful at your job, you must work fast and efficiently and nonstop all the time you are on the payroll. You must become an expert at time management. You must become so efficient and effective that you get twice as much done as anyone else. In this way, you will advance your career at the fastest rate possible, and you will also be on top of your job most of the time, and it will be unnecessary for you to take work home for the evenings and weekends.

Then, when you have finished your work, you can devote your full attention to your family and to the other important people in your life. The Bible says, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” One of the meanings of this is that if you are thinking about your work while you are with your family, or if you are thinking about your family when you are at work, you end up accomplishing far less in each area. However, if you are on top of your work, when you come home you can devote yourself single-mindedly again, like a monomaniac to your relationships and to enhancing the quality of your interactions with the most important people in your life.

The key to a happy family life is communication. And it is not quality of time but quantity of time that counts. Quality moments those little moments that are precious and important come unbidden and, usually, unexpectedly. They arise during the process of spending a large quantity of uninterrupted time with one or more people. You cannot dictate those moments in advance. You cannot decide to have quality time. You do not go to it. It comes to you.

There are a variety of ways to extract the greatest amount of quality and happiness from your relationships with the members of your family. Perhaps the most important is to spend unbroken time with your spouse on a daily basis. Of course, you should spend time together talking after the children have gone to bed, but you should also seek out and utilize small segments of time during the morning and early evening during which you can communicate and interact. One of the most important things that couples can do is spend the first 30 to 60 minutes after work debriefing each other and discussing the day’s activities.

Your children also have a tremendous need to communicate with you. In fact, in my research on how to raise super kids, I found that the one factor that was more important than any other was the amount of one-on-one time that the parents spent with the children. When parents don’t spend a lot of time with their children individually, they send a message to their children that they are not very valuable or important. Children then react by experiencing feelings of inferiority, lowered self-esteem, and negative self-images, and this is expressed in poor grades and behavioral problems. But when the parents take the time to sit down with their children and ask questions and listen to what is going on in their minds, the children tend to feel a deep sense of value and importance that is manifested in self-confidence, happiness, and good relationships with others.

The key is learning to use your time better. You cannot get more hours out of each day, but you can put more of yourself into each of those hours. Turn off the television and spend time talking with the members of your family. Never read newspaper of books when a member of your family wants to communicate with you. Put the reading material aside. Concentrate single-mindedly on the most important people in your world. Everything else can wait.

In regard to your work and family, continually ask yourself, “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?” Consider if what you are doing today will matter a week or a year from today. Sometimes, we become preoccupied with small things that are not really important in the long run. But what is important in the long run is the quality of our home life.

You don’t have to be a superman or superwoman to properly balance the demands of your work and the needs of your family. You must, however, be more thoughtful, be a better planner, use your time more effectively, and continually think of ways to enhance the quality of your life in both areas. If you set this as a goal and resolve to work toward it every day, you will gradually become far more efficient, far more effective, and a far happier human being. And that’s the most important thing of all.

Unlocking Your Creativity

I began studying creativity more than 20 years ago. I thought it was an ability that was possessed by a few, especially intelligent people, such as artists and writers and scientists. But as I delved further into the subject, I came to a remarkable conclusion: I am a genius! Not only that, but you, too, are a genius! In fact, probably 95 percent of the population has the capacity to function at exceptional levels. Creativity is as natural to human beings as is breathing in and out. Everyone is creative to a certain extent. People are highly creative because they decide to be highly creative. It’s no miracle. Creativity is like any human faculty; it can be developed with practice and strengthened with constant use.

If you improve things in small ways, you are engaging in small acts of creativity. If you make major breakthroughs, and improve parts of your life in extraordinary ways, you are demonstrating high levels of creativity. And the amount of creativity you use in your life is largely up to you.

If creativity is improvement, in what areas do you want to use it? The answer is simple. You want to use your inborn creativity to improve the parts of your life that are most important to you. You can use your creativity to improve your relationships, to increase your income and improve your business, and to assure yourself higher levels of health and happiness. With that definition, you can see clearly that you have opportunities to be creative from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night.

Creativity is like a muscle. If you do not deliberately and consciously flex your creativity on a regular basis, it becomes weak and soft. It loses its strength.

If people criticize you for your ideas, or if you have concluded that you are not particularly creative, you will tend to be more passive and submissive and look to others for new and better ways of solving problems and achieving goals. However, if you start to practice creative thinking, along the lines that I’m going to share with you, you will be absolutely amazed at how smart you really are.

I used to think that you had to be highly intelligent to be creative. Then I found that intelligence is not just a matter of IQ. There are many people with high IQs who got excellent grades in school but who are doing very poorly at life. They are working at jobs they don’t like and earning salaries that are far below their potentials. They probably haven’t come up with a creative idea in years.

Intelligence is a way of acting. If you act intelligently, you are intelligent. If you act stupidly, you are stupid. That’s all there is to it. You can decide to be highly intelligent and highly creative simply by doing the things that highly intelligent and highly creative people do. If you do these things over and over, you’ll soon get the same results. People around you will be talking about how bright and full of ideas you have become.

There are three basic qualities of genius. Since you are a genius, you should know what they are and apply them regularly. The first quality of genius is open-mindedness. People who are fluent, flexible and adaptive in their thinking are far brighter than those who are rigid, mechanical and straitlaced. The more open you are to new ideas and possibilities, to new approaches and solutions, the more creatively you will function.

Most people tend to fall into what are called “thinking traps.” They assume that there is only one right answer to a problem; in reality, there could be several right answers. They jump to conclusions, assuming that because one thing happens, it is the reason for another thing’s happening; there may be no relationship at all between the two events. Sometimes people think that the problem has to be solved immediately; often, the problem can be deferred for some time, and often it will solve itself if left alone. People think that certain problems have to be solved without spending any money; often, if the solution is important enough, it is a good idea to spend money on it. Another thinking trap people fall into is thinking they have to solve the whole problem; sometimes, solving just one part of the problem is enough for the time. A final thinking trap is thinking that it is your problem and you are the one who must solve it; often, it is someone else’s problem, and the very best thing for you to do is to turn it over to that person and refuse to get involved.

The second quality of genius is the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time, on one problem at a time. And to stay with it until it’s solved. Highly creative people practice focusing on single questions and single problems, while uncreative people diffuse their mental energies by trying to do several things at once. They work on this and work on that. They pick something up and put it down. Then they go on to something else and come back. Often, they are scatterbrained, and if they do come up with ideas, their ideas are shallow and poorly thought-out.

The difference between diffusion and concentration in creativity is the difference between gentle sunlight and sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass. It is the difference between light and a laser beam. It is the difference between a small flame and a welding torch. Your job, in increasing your creativity and enhancing your intelligence, is to concentrate your powers where they can do the most good.

The third quality of genius is the ability to approach problems systematically. People who throw themselves at their problems often become frantic and confused. They take a haphazard approach to thinking, and then they are amazed when they find themselves floundering and making no progress.

In his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker makes the point very clearly that innovation must be a systematic process. It must be planned and organized. It is too important to be random and haphazard.

Here is a 10-step method you can use to think systematically. With this method, you develop your creativity to genius levels. 1. Change your language from negative to positive. Instead of using the word problem, use the word situation, or call it a challenge or an opportunity. If a sale falls through, you can say something like, “This is an interesting challenge. It is an opportunity for me to improve my sales effectiveness so this doesn’t happen again in the future.”

The more positive your language is, the more confident and optimistic you will be when approaching any difficulty. The more creative and insightful you will be in identifying solutions and breakthrough ideas.

2. Define your situation or difficulty clearly. What exactly is the challenge you are facing? What is causing you the stress and anxiety? What is causing you to worry? Why are you unhappy? Write it out clearly in detail.

Sometimes what you are worrying about is what is called a “cluster problem.” It is a series of small problems clustered together. You need to sort them out and define them separately.

3. Ask, “What else is the problem?” Don’t be satisfied with a superficial answer. Look for the root cause of the problem rather than get sidetracked by the symptom. Approach the problem from several different directions.

For example, if your business is slow, you could ask, “What exactly is the challenge facing me?” Your first answer might be that sales are down. But what else is the problem? How else could you phrase your answer to make the problem more amenable to a solution?

Here are some different ways of answering that question. You could say that sales are down. You could say also that you are not selling enough. Or you could say that people are not buying enough. Or you could say that people are buying too much of your competition’s product. Or you could say that people are not buying your product the way it is currently produced or packaged. Or people are not buying your product the way you are selling it, or for the reasons you think they should, or in the quantity you need them to buy it for you to be financially successful.

In each case, by changing your definition of the problem, you change your possible approach to the solution. You expand your possibilities. You become more creative. You unlock more of your inner genius.

4. Ask, “What are my minimum boundary conditions?” What must the solution accomplish? What ingredients must the solution contain? What would your ideal solution to this problem look like? Define the parameters clearly.

5. Pick the best solution by comparing your various possible solutions against your problem, on the one hand, and your ideal solution, on the other. What is the best thing to do at this time under the circumstances?

6. Before you implement the decision, ask, “What’s the worst possible thing that can happen if this decision doesn’t work?” I remember once spending all the advertising money of the company I was working for on a single advertising campaign. I was convinced that, even at a low rate of return, sales would more than justify the expenditure. I failed to ask that question about the worst possible outcome. I got blindsided by the “fallacy of large numbers,” which says that if you advertise to an enormous number of people, the odds are that you will get a certain number of sales. What happened was that I got no sales at all from the advertising. As a result, I almost ruined the business. I should have asked, “What effect would there be on the business if the advertising did not work at all?”

In fact, before you make any expenditure of money or effort in trying to achieve your goal, you should evaluate what would happen if your decision were a complete failure.

7. Set measures on your decision. How will you know that you are making progress? How will you measure success? How will you compare the success of this solution against the success of another solution? If you decide to sell or market in a particular way, how will you know that you have made the right decision? How will you define a success? Make it measurable. Then monitor it on a regular basis.

8. Accept complete responsibility for implementing the decision. You might want to delegate responsibility for the implementation of the action steps to someone else. Many of the most creative ideas never materialize because no one is specifically assigned the responsibility of carrying out the decision.

9. Set a deadline. A decision without a deadline is a meaningless discussion. If it is a major decision and will take some time to implement, set a series of short-term deadlines and a schedule for reporting. If you have a one-year goal to increase your income, break down the goal into months, and then break down the months into weeks. Break down the weeks into days and the days into hours. Then discipline yourself to do the things you need to do, every hour of every day, to assure that you achieve your weekly and monthly goals and your annual goal on schedule.

With the deadlines and subdeadlines, you will know immediately if you are on track or if you are falling behind. You can then use your creativity to alleviate further bottlenecks or choke points.

10. Take action. Get busy. Get going. Develop a sense of urgency. The faster you move in the direction of your clearly defined goals, the more creative you will be. The more energy you will have. The more you will learn. And the faster you will develop your capacity to achieve even more in the future.

The world is full of creative individuals who have wonderful ideas. But almost all of them fall down when it comes to implementation. And this is where you can excel. The future belongs to the creative minority who can not only think but also take action and put their ideas into effect.

You can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle or achieve any goal that you can set for yourself by using your wonderful creative mind and then taking action consistently and persistently until you attain your objective. Success is a mark of a creative thinker, and when you use your ability to think creatively, your success can be unlimited.

The Virtual Project Team

When I began studying time management some years ago, I was amazed to discover that all great accomplishments are the result of “multi-task jobs.” Everything worthwhile is achieved by a variety of people coming together to perform a variety of jobs, all of which are coordinated and sequenced together to achieve a final result. Today, this model of the virtual corporation or the virtual team is becoming the key to success in both individual and business life.

A perfect example of the virtual project team would be the video crew that makes my video training programs. This crew consists of about 10 people, most of whom know each other but all of whom work independently from each other.

This is the way this type of team comes together. When I decide to create a training program, I negotiate an agreement for the finished product with a person who becomes the project’s executive producer. The executive producer knows where to find the key people to make up the team. And here is an important point: selection is 95 percent of success in management.

For you to select the right people, you must be clear about the key result areas and the standards of job performance. Most people judge themselves on the basis of what they feel they are capable of doing in the future, but you must only judge people based on what they have actually accomplished in the past. The inability to choose people well for a team can lead to under-achievement and failure.

The executive producer of the film crew will then begin hiring the individual members of the video shooting team. First, he or she will hire three cameramen, who come complete with state-of-the-art camera equipment that they either own or rent for this project. Then there will be lighting and sound specialists. A combination carpenter and designer will be hired to concept and build the set for the video project. A floor director will be selected who will coordinate the activities of the cameramen, the people appearing in the video shoot, the sound person, the light person, and the designer.

In addition to these people, there will be an editor and mixer who will sit in the video sound booth and mix the project as it is shot and edit it afterwards. Finally, there will be a make-up specialist who prepares each of the performers for the shoot.

This makes for a total of 10 people, all specialists who are brought together to focus on the production of a single video project. The actual shoot itself can take anywhere from two hours to two weeks. When it is over and everyone has done their jobs, the crew shakes hands and disperses in different directions, going on to join other crews for other video shoots under other circumstances.

In corporations today, the continuous formation and dissolution of these “virtual teams” is becoming the norm for achieving goals. People who specialize in their fields are brought together under a team leader to perform a function or do a job and then disperse to become members of other teams performing other functions. It is into this constant formation and reformation of teams that you must integrate yourself so that you can maximize your capacity to make a significant contribution wherever you work.

Peter Drucker, in his book Managing in a Time of Great Change, points out that there are three different types of teams, each of which is appropriate for the achievement of specific goals.

The first type of team is the “baseball team” model. A surgical team in an operating room, or even a video crew working as a team, fall into this category.

In this model, the players have specific positions on the team that they never leave. They do not have interchangeable positions: the cameraman is always a cameraman, the shortstop is always a shortstop, etc. They may work together in harmony, supporting and assisting each other, but they always play their specific, designated role in their area of specialization. In this “baseball team” type of model, each performer can be evaluated and rewarded independently of the others.

The second type of team is the “football team” model. This is a little different from the “baseball team” in that each player has a specific role but they all work together in parallel to contribute their talents to the achievement of a single goal. In the “football team” model, there is a coach who calls the plays, there is a team against which they compete, and there is a specific goal to be achieved. The members work very closely with each other to move the ball down the field.

The third type of team is the “tennis doubles” model. This team functions like a jazz combo, with the players harmonizing all their activities, but with each player in charge of a specific instrument. Each person has a fixed position, based on their area of specialization, but they also cover for each other and respond as a team to the changes being driven on the outside by the explosion of information, technology, and competition.

The one thing all these teams have in common is that they must enjoy a high degree of harmony and trust if they are to function at their best. The principle of “synergy” says that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Five or six people working together in complete harmony toward a common goal can produce the work of 10 or 15, or even 20 people who are disorganized or working at cross purposes.

None of these teams can substitute for each other. Each of them is based on individuals performing in coordination with each other, but a “baseball team” model cannot substitute for a “football team” model. And neither of these models can substitute for a “tennis doubles” model. One of the most important jobs you have is to determine the type of team that you are either putting together or serving on.

A team is a tool with a specific purpose. Each team has its own use, its own characteristics, its own requirements, and its own limitations. Each team is formed to achieve a specific goal of some kind.

Remember, on every team, the 80/20 Rule applies. 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the people. Your goal is to be among the 20 percent of the team players who do 80 percent of the work. And never worry about who gets the credit. Everyone always knows who the key team players are. In fact, the more you give the credit away to others, the more you will get back for yourself.

Your ability to integrate yourself into your organization and be an excellent team player will do more to earn you the respect of others and open doors of opportunity than you can possibly imagine. The winners and high achievers in every area of life throw themselves wholeheartedly into whatever they commit themselves to doing. They start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later. They look upon every assignment as an opportunity to grow in both experience and reputation. And they recognize that every job they do carries their own personal signature on it for everyone to read.

The Role of a Leader

Your ability to negotiate, communicate, influence, and persuade others to do things is absolutely indispensable to everything you accomplish in life. The most effective men and women in every area are those who can quite competently organize the cooperation and assistance of other people toward the accomplishment of important goals and objectives.

Of course, everyone you meet has different values, opinions, attitudes, beliefs, cultural values, work habits, goals, ambitions, and dreams. Because of this incredible diversity of human resources, it has never been more difficult and yet more necessary for diplomatic leaders to emerge and form these people into high-performing teams.

Fortunately, leaders are made, not born. You learn to become a leader by doing what other excellent leaders have done before you. You become proficient in your job or skill, and then you become proficient at understanding the motivations and behaviors of other people. As a leader, you combine your personal competencies with the competencies of a variety of others into a smoothly functioning team that can out-play and out-perform all its competitors.

When you become a team leader, even if your team only consists of one other person, you must immediately develop a whole new set of leadership skills. In order to determine what these skills are, you need to consider the genesis of high-performing teams.

Teams generally go through four phases as they evolve toward high performance. These stages are called forming, storming, norming, and performing.

The forming stage is very important, perhaps even critical, to the success of the team. Your ability to select the proper team members in order to accomplish a particular task-personal or business-is the mark of the superior leader. If you select the wrong people in the first place, it becomes almost impossible afterward to build a winning team, just as it would be impossible to win athletic championships with unskilled or ill-suited players.

In the forming stage, the team members come together and begin to get a feeling for each other. There will be a good deal of discussion, argument, disagreement, personal expression of likes and dislikes, and the forming of friendly alliances between team members. This stage, especially the discussions and conversations that take place, may seem time consuming, but it is absolutely indispensable to the development of a unified group of people that you can lead. One of the most important qualities of a leader is that of patience. And patience is never more necessary than when you are going through the early stages of assembling your team.

The second stage of team development is called storming. Storming is a shortened form of the word “brainstorming.” It is during this stage when the group, whose members are now comfortable with each other, begins the hard work of setting goals and deadlines, dividing up the tasks, and getting on with the job. During the storming phase, people learn about the contributions that each member can make to achieve the purposes of the team.

The third stage of team development is called norming. This is where norms and standards are established among the team members so that everyone feels secure and confident in his or her place. All members know what is expected and how it is to be measured. And all members are aware of the responsibilities and obligations that they have, not only to the job, but to the each other as well. Your ability as a leader to promote the norming process is critical to the success of the team.

The fourth stage of team development is performing. In the final analysis, your ability to get results is all that really matters. Your lifestyle, your rate of promotion and level of rewards, and your respect and esteem among your co-workers and bosses will all be determined by your ability to perform and to get others to perform. There are basically five qualities of the most productive work teams that you need to foster throughout the stages of team development. The degree to which you accomplish this before you start working will determine your success as a team leader and the success of the team as a whole.

The first quality is the existence of shared values. You can foster this quality by asking the question, “What are our values?” or, “What do we stand for?” People will contribute the values they consider the most important. As they do, you or someone else can write them on a flipchart. The values will usually be something like: integrity, excellence, quality, caring about people, profitability, and harmony. The second quality of top teams is shared objectives. It is absolutely essential that everyone takes the time to discuss the actual reason for forming the team and the chief results that are expected of them.

Leaders are those who can see the big picture. They are absolutely clear about what it is they want to accomplish and what it will look like. They have the ability to articulate this vision in the minds and hearts of others and to get everyone, no matter what their background or personality, working together in harmony toward the realization of that vision.

People cannot hit a target they cannot see. Again, even though it may appear time consuming, everyone needs to have ample opportunity to discuss and agree on the ultimate goals desired before work begins. The more thorough the discussion on goals and objectives, the more effective the team will be when it begins working.

The third quality of highly-productive teams is shared activities. Everyone knows what they are supposed to contribute to the achievement of the overall goals and objectives of the team. Everyone also knows what each of the other members is expected to do. All the work that has to be done is clearly divided up among the team members, and everyone knows their role in the process.

The fourth quality of high-performing teams is that the head of the team leads the action. You become the role model for all of the others. You go out in front. You continually look for ways to make it easier for your team members to do their jobs. You accept complete responsibility for the achievement of the overall goal. You start a little earlier, you work a little harder, and you stay a little later. You set careful priorities on your time and you always work on your highest value tasks. You never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself. You always put yourself out in front and go to bat for your people in every circumstance. You are a leader because you continually lead.

The fifth and final quality of high-performing teams is that individually and as a group, they continually evaluate their progress toward their goals and values. The are always asking themselves, “How are we doing, and how can we do better?” When they manufacture or sell products in the marketplace, they ask their customers for ongoing feedback and evaluation. They set incredible standards of excellence and they are constantly striving to be better.

Whenever they have problems, misunderstandings, or difficulties within the team, they reexamine their values, their goals, their activities, their assignments, and their responsibilities. They are more concerned with what’s right than with who’s right. They are more concerned with winning than with not losing. High-Performing teams run by excellent leaders, are determined to perform in an excellent fashion. All members know that their ability to work together in harmony and cooperation is the key to the success of every one of them.

The wonderful thing about becoming a leader in your work and personal life is that you can practice the skills of influencing and persuading others toward a common objective. You can promote the principles of excellent teamwork by establishing your values and goals, determining your activities, and then leading the action. And you can improve yourself by continually evaluating your performance against your standards.

One of the marks of excellent people is that they never compare themselves with others. They only compare themselves with themselves and with their past accomplishments and future potential. You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards. The more proficient you become at getting the results for which you were hired, the more opportunities you will have to get results through others. And your ability to put together a team and then to lead that team to high performance will enable you to accelerate your career and fulfill your goals faster than ever before.

The Art of Self-Promotion

The starting point of self-promotion is to set a goal and make a plan to become one of the very best people in your field. The better you get and the more respected you become, the more you will have in common with other people who also are farther along on the road of life. You must ask for advice and follow it. You must make every effort to overcome the obstacles within yourself that might be holding you back. You must develop the essential skills that you need to join the top 20 percent in your field.

The wonderful thing about this aspect of self-promotion is that it is totally under your control. It depends on no one else. It is an ongoing journey. As Denis Waitley says, “It is continually viewing yourself as a ‘do it to yourself’ project.”

Meanwhile, there are a variety of things that you can do to promote yourself by getting to know more and more of the most important people in your community and your industry. This is the second aspect of self-promotion. As you are getting better at what you do, you deliberately and systematically make efforts to meet more people who you can help and who can help you.

People in any field eventually take on the attitudes and behaviors of the other people in that field. Your peer group has a powerful effect on the person you are today and on the person you will become tomorrow. The friends you socialize with after work and on the weekends have an enormous impact on everything you do and accomplish. Every major turning point in your life will coincide with the development of a new group of friends and associates. I have seen many occasions where an average salesperson joined a company that was full of top salespeople; within three months, he or she also was a top salesperson in the industry. The very change of reference groups often leads to a complete change of aspirations, goals, work routines, and levels of achievement.

Many people’s lives are, unfortunately, a series of random or haphazard events, like bumper cars at a carnival. They take whatever job is offered to them. They have lunch with whoever is available, and they socialize with whoever they run into, whoever happens to be going out the door at the same time. Their human relationships are largely unplanned and uncoordinated. Their lives seem to go back and forth, and they make very little progress.

Successful people, on the other hand, are very deliberate about their choice of friends, associates and colleagues. Successful people make a plan for their lives, and then they look around them to see which people fit into their plans for where they are going in the years ahead. Successful people are very specific about what they need to do and who they need to know if they want to get ahead rapidly.

Baron Rothschild, one of the world’s wealthiest men in his time, wrote in his rules for success, “Make no useless acquaintances.” To some people, this seems a little undemocratic. Aren’t you just supposed to like and hang around with anybody who happens to be there, regardless of personality or direction? Not if you want your life to take a specific, upward path.

In one study, it was found that the top 20 percent of high achievers strongly identified with other high achievers, even before they had had a chance to accomplish very much in life. Their role models were men and women at the top of their organizations. The high achievers did not identify with the average people around them. Their sights were set much higher. And in almost no time at all, they were up among the top 20 percent, exactly as they had planned it.

There are a variety of things that you can do to promote yourself to the front of the line, to the head of the pack. You can bring yourself to the attention of people who can help you quite rapidly, simply by engaging in the same behaviors that others have used over the years to rise rapidly in competitive careers.

Start with your work. As I said earlier, you must be very good at what you do and continually get better if you want to get ahead in your company. Sometimes, people are convinced that they can play politics to get ahead. However, it has been shown again and again that politics and gamesmanship will get a person only so far before he is found out. Peter Drucker, the management consultant, says, “Only the truly competent person can rise above politics.” Politics in organizations has to do with gaining control of people and resources. If you are one of the most valuable people in your organization, you will not have to engage in very much politicking because you will be one of the precious resources that others will be eager to court and influence. You can rise above petty politicking simply by getting better and better at what you do. When you reach the point where you are making an invaluable contribution, everyone else, including your boss, will come to you. Being good at what you do is the key to gaining the respect and esteem of people around you.

Now, let’s say you are in an organization that has quite a few people who are good at what they do. How can you stand out from the crowd? In a study of 104 senior executives, the vast majority said that the key to rapid promotion in their organizations was twofold. First, they said, an individual had to have the ability to set clear priorities, to focus on what was valuable and relevant rather than waste time on what was small and insignificant. Second, they said, the employee had to have a “sense of urgency,” a desire and a drive to get the job done fast.

In short, your developing a reputation for speed and dependability, for doing the right things and doing them right, and quickly, is the most important reputation you can develop with your boss. It’s invaluable to getting ahead rapidly.

I recommend that you make a list of everything that you feel you have been hired to accomplish. Take the list to your boss and ask your boss to organize the list in order of priority. What does your boss consider to be the most important thing you do? What does she consider to be the second most important thing?

Discuss the list with your boss so that you and your boss are perfectly clear about exactly why you are on the payroll. Then, concentrate on doing an excellent job at the things that are most important to him or her. I have discussed this with thousands of managers, all over the country, they all say that there is nothing that pleases them more than to have an employee who is working hard on something that the managers consider to be of top priority. Continually ask your boss if there is anything that he does on a regular basis that you can take off his shoulders. Every boss has tasks that he or she dislikes. If you can take one or more of these tasks away, and learn how to do it yourself, you will be promoting yourself in one of the most professional ways possible.

Self-promotion also means looking for every opportunity to help your boss and coworkers to look good at their jobs. Concentrate on cooperation rather than competition. If you help others get ahead, it will come back to you exponentially. And the more you help others, the more they will help you in return.

According to the Law of Sowing and Reaping, the more you give of yourself, without expectation of return, the more will come back to you from the most unexpected sources. Successful people in every organization are always looking for ways to help, always looking for ways to put in more than they take out. As my father once said, “It’s amazing how much you can get done when no one cares who gets the credit.”

In self-promotion, you never need to worry about who will get the credit. The more credit you give away, the more will come back to you. The more you help others, the more they will want to help you. The more you put in to help your boss look good and stay on top of his or her work, the more your boss will want to open doors of opportunity that enable you to get ahead.

Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote, “All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.”

Your job is to engage in deliberate self-promotion by becoming very good at what you do, by becoming indispensable to your boss and your company, and by becoming better and better known to the important people in your field. The rewards that will come back to you eventually will be much greater than the efforts that you have put in. And there is no limit to what you can put in.

Teaming Up With Your Customers

What is the purpose of a business? Every time I ask this question during a business seminar, the immediate answer that I get back is, “To make a profit.”

But this answer is wrong. The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. If a business successfully creates and keeps customers in a cost-effective way, it will make a profit while continuing to survive and thrive. If, for any reason, a business fails to attract or sustain a sufficient number of customers, it will experience losses. Too many losses will lead to the demise of the enterprise.

According to Dun and Bradstreet, the single, most important reason for the failure of businesses in America is lack of sales. And, of course, this refers to resales as well as initial sales.

So your company’s job is to create and keep a customer, and your job is exactly the same. Remember, no matter what you official title is, you are a salesperson for yourself and your company. And the best way to increase your value as a salesperson is to build your customer base.

The two most important words to keep in mind in developing a successful customer base are Positioning and Differentiation. Positioning refers to the way your customers think and talk about you and your company when you are not there. The position that you hold in the customer’s mind determines all of his reactions and interactions with you. Your position determines whether or not your customer buys, whether he buys again and whether he refers others to you. Everything that you do with regard to your customer affects the way your customer thinks about you.

Differentiation refers to your ability to separate yourself and your product or service from that of your competitors. And it is the key to building a maintaining a competitive advantage. This is the advantage that you and your company have over your competitors in the same marketplace, the unique and special benefits that no one else can give your customer.

When you begin to think about acquiring and keeping customers for life, you need to think about the particular types of customers for whom your competitive advantage is so important that they would be poorly served by using anyone else’s product. You need to then emphasize again and again that the special features and benefits you offer are so important that they should not even think of going somewhere else. If, for any reason, you fail to do this, you may lose the customer and all the work you’ve done in building that relationship in the first place.

There are three keys to keeping customers for life: relationship selling, partnering for profit, and consultative selling. These are all methods for differentiating yourself from anyone else who is offering the same product or service. They are ways to get customers and keep them. I will explain each of these in detail.

Relationship Selling is the core of all modern selling strategies. Your ability to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships is the foundation for your success as a salesperson and your success in business. Relationship selling requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of the selling process as they are experienced by your customer.

For your customer, a buying decision usually means a decision to enter into a long-term relationship with you and your company. It is very much like a “business marriage.” Before the customer decides to buy, he can take you or leave you. He doesn’t need you or your company. He has a variety of options and choices open to him, including not buying anything at all. But when your customer makes a decision to buy from you and gives you money for the product or service you are selling, he becomes dependent on you. And since he has probably had bad buying experiences in the past, he is very uneasy and uncertain about getting into this kind of dependency relationship.

What if you let the customer down? What if your product does not work as you promised? What if you don’t service it and support it as you promised? What if it breaks down and he can’t get it replaced? What if the product or service is completely inappropriate for his needs? These are real dilemmas that go through the mind of every customer when it comes time to make the critical buying decision.

Because of the complexity of most products and services today, especially high-tech products, the relationship is actually more important than the product. The customer doesn’t know the ingredients or components of your product, or how your company functions, or how he will be treated after he has given you his money, but he can make an assessment about you and about the relationship that has developed between the two of you over the course of the selling process. So in reality, the customer’s decision is based on the fact that he has come to trust you and believe in what you say.

In many cases, the quality of your relationship with the customer is the competitive advantage that enables you to edge out others who may have similar products and services. The quality of the trust bond that exists between you and your customers can be so strong that no other competitor can get between you.

The single biggest mistake that causes salespeople to lose customers is taking those customers for granted. This is a form of “customer entropy.” It is when the salesperson relaxes his efforts and begins to ignore the customer. Almost 70 percent of customers who walked away from their existing suppliers later replied that they made the change primarily because of a lack of attention from the company. Once you have invested the time and made the efforts necessary to build a high-quality, trust-based relationship with your customer, you must maintain that relationship for the life of your business. You must never take it for granted.

Beyond relationship selling, the second key to keeping customers for life is the “partnering for profit” approach to business sales. When you deal with a businessperson, you can be sure of one thing: that person thinks about his business day and night. It is very close to him. It is dear to his heart. And if you come in and talk to him and ask him questions about his business, looking for ways to help him run his business better, the customer is going to warm up to you and want to be associated with you and your company.

As a partner, you should always be looking to help your customer to cut costs and improve results in his or her area of responsibility. You should look for ways to help your customer in non-business areas as well. You should position yourself as someone who cares more about the success of your customer than anything else, even more than you care about selling your product or service. This approach to partnering in profit with your customer is a key way to differentiate yourself and to keep your customer for the indefinite future.

There is a principle of reciprocity in business that is extremely powerful. It is simply this: If you do something nice for someone else, they will feel obligated to do something nice for you. You should be looking for opportunities to go the extra mile, to do more than you are paid for, to put in more than you take out. By extending yourself, you improve your positioning in the customer’s mind and increasingly differentiate yourself and your company from your competitors who are after the same business. If you do this long enough and strong enough, you will eventually develop the partnership to the point where your competitors don’t have a chance against you.

The third part of keeping customers for life is the consulting approach to your customer, or what is called consultative selling. When you position yourself as a consultant, you are really positioning yourself to serve your customer as a problem solver. Instead of trying to sell something to your customer, you concentrate all of your efforts and attention on helping your customer solve his problems, achieve his goals, or satisfy his needs. You ask excellent questions that help your customer think through his situation in greater depth. And you listen carefully to the answers, knowing that listening builds trust.

Most successful salespeople are invariably referred to as friends, advisors, and counselor by their customers. The final description, and perhaps the best description customers use for top salespeople, is contained in the words, “He (or she) really understands my situation.”

When customers are asked why they decided to buy from a particular salesperson or company, they invariably give these reasons: the reputation of the company, the level of service and support that the company offers, the reliability of the company and the salesperson, the responsiveness of the organization to complaints and requests, and the quality of the individual salesperson with whom they have been dealing. Price ranks at number seven or eight, if it comes up at all in the surveys. This is important for you to know because it is amazing how many salespeople get sidetracked into negotiating on the basis of price and then they can’t understand why they failed to get the sale.

84 percent of all sales in America originate from the recommendations of satisfied customers. A referral to a new customer is worth ten times more than a cold call. And it is 16 times easier to sell a satisfied customer something new than it is to sell something to a brand new prospect. In the final analysis, dedicating yourself to serving your customers in such a way that you keep them for life is one of the smartest and most profitable things that you can ever do.

Practical Project Management

Some skills are peripheral to success. It’s nice to have them, but they don’t make much of a difference one way or another. There are other skills, however, that are absolutely essential to your fulfilling your potential, and you must develop them to a fairly high degree if you are to achieve all of your goals.

One of these absolutely essential skills is the ability to manage projects of various sizes. A project is defined as a multitask job, the kind that you engage in every day in the process of making a living and carrying on the business of your life. To be a success, you must be good at project management.

One of the great dangers in project management is feeling that we already know all we need to know about the subject. Too many people take their ability to do several jobs at once, or in a row, for granted. They fall into the intelligence trap of the low performer. They use their intelligence to point out to themselves and to others how confident and capable they already are. They join the ranks of the “unconscious incompetent.” The unconscious incompetent is the person who does not know, and he does not know that he does not know. Project management is a function not just of those who build hydroelectric dams or construct huge skyscrapers. You organize and engage in a project each time you go shopping at the grocery store. If you are in sales, every prospect you are working on developing into a regular customer is a project. If you are going out for the evening with another person, you are planning and organizing a project.

And here is a key point. Your ability to organize and carry through a project successfully is a key skill for success. It is the essential art of management. It is the way that you multiply yourself and your results. Your ability to manage projects of all kinds is absolutely indispensable to your achieving financial independence and moving to the top in your field.

Many people can type, but few people can type 80 or 90 words a minute without mistakes. Millions of people know how to operate computers, but only a few can use the computer so skillfully as to maximize its capacities in helping them to do their work and accomplish their objectives. Many people can sell, but the top 10 percent of salespeople still open 80 percent of the new accounts and make most of the money.

Project management is similar. Everyone knows how to carry out a multitask job. But few people are good at it. Most are partially organized and partially disorganized. They spend too much time, too much money, and they make too many mistakes in getting from Point A to Point B. They don’t manage the projects in their lives skillfully because they don’t know how critical this ability is to accomplishing virtually everything else they could possibly want in life.

To succeed in life, you need leverage; you need assistance. If you want to achieve big things, and live a great life, you need the help of lots of people. You need to be very good at coordinating the activities of several people in a single direction toward a predetermined objective. If you don’t develop your skills at project management, you will still be involved in projects, but you will always be a team member and never be a team leader.

The economic strength of America is due to many things, and one of the most important is specialization of tasks, or division of labor. This simply means that most people, instead of trying to be jacks-of-all-trades, specialize and become very good at doing one or two things. Today, one of the most popular words in American business is outsourcing. This means that, instead of hiring or building a capability in-house, you delegate an entire function of your company to another company that specializes in doing only that one task. Many people are finding that it is cheaper to have functions such as payroll, accounting, drop-shipping, manufacturing, assembly, delivery and distribution, plus a thousand other tasks, done by other companies that specialize in those areas than it is to do them in-house.

Your whole life is a process of outsourcing. Whether you are aware of it or not, you are continually outsourcing tasks and activities to a hundred other enterprises, such as grocery stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, quick-oil-change franchises and tailors. You don’t bother to learn how to do those things yourself. It is much faster and cheaper for you to turn the tasks over to people who specialize in them. They can do the tasks faster, better and with fewer mistakes than you ever could imagine. By outsourcing, you free up your time to do more and more of the things that you do best and for which you are the highest paid. It is one of the keys to developing the leverage that turns you into a multiplication sign with your talents and abilities.

In project management, you engage in a systematic and well-organized process of outsourcing the various tasks that need to be done to achieve a particular objective. You develop synergy by pulling together the talents and abilities of a lot of people toward the accomplishment of a single goal. By working together as a team, a group of people with different talents can accomplish extraordinary things. And your ability to get all members of a team pulling in the same direction is the key to your maximizing yourself in your life and in your career.

To unleash the cooperative capabilities of a team of people toward the achievement of a multitask job, the operative word should be harmony. One of the most important things you can do is to strive for harmony among the people working with you and for you.

Project management is an art. It requires thought. Whenever you have a large job to do, your very first step is to sit down with a pad of paper and begin to “think on paper.” All highly successful men and women think on paper. They write things down before they begin. They make lists, and they make sublists. They use calculators. And they analyze every detail of a large project before they begin. They think it through from beginning to end. And in so doing, they save enormous amounts of time and money, and they seem to get more done in a few months than the average person gets done in years.

Project management takes practice, as does anything else. It requires self-discipline. It requires the willpower to hold yourself back from plunging into a task before thinking it through in advance. Many people are in a “reactive-responsive” mode. They react to whatever is happening around them, and they respond to however they feel at the moment. They leap into things, and then they leap out. They rush to make judgments, come to decisions and take actions without bothering to analyze the situation thoroughly. They make enormous numbers of mistakes and are seen by others as incompetent and disorganized. Don’t be one of those people.

When you decide to become excellent at project management, you begin to apply a systematic process such as the one I will describe. Your ability to achieve multitask jobs is to control everything else you accomplish. And it’s not that difficult to learn.

In any project, the first thing to do is start at the goal and work back. Stephen Covey says, “Begin with the end in mind.” Dr. Roberto Assagioli suggests that you begin all activities by creating the ideal result or outcome that you desire, either on paper or in your mind, before you proceed to planning and organizing. Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, says that the most powerful of all organizing principles is a future vision of a clear goal to which you, and others, are committed. In his research on peak performers, Dr. Charles Garfield found that a person’s ability to project his mind forward to the desired end state, to the goal as if it were already achieved, the task as though it were completed perfectly in every respect, is the starting point of maximum achievement. In any case, every project begins with your clearly defining exactly what you want to accomplish and what it will look like if it is accomplished perfectly.

For example, let’s say that you decide to take a two-week trip to the Caribbean next winter. This is a project. You begin by defining what an ideal Caribbean vacation would consist of in every detail. You think about the hotel, the beaches, the daytime and evening activities you enjoy, the kind of people and service you want to experience and, of course, your budget. With all of those ingredients, and perhaps more, in mind, you come up with a clear description of the perfect winter holiday in the sun.

You then make a list of everything that you will have to do in order to achieve that final goal. You investigate the various Caribbean islands you could visit. You call more than one travel agent, to find out if there are particular packages, including airfare and hotels, that you can purchase at excellent prices well in advance. You plan your budget and determine where and when you will get the money that you require for this trip. You consider your work responsibilities and think through how you will arrange being away for two weeks without your company or your clients suffering at the time. If you have children, you think through their requirements, whether they will come with you or stay with someone while you are away. If you have animals, you think about how they will be taken care of. You think about the various clothes and accessories that you will need for a two-week Caribbean vacation.

Once you have determined exactly how you want the goal to look when it is complete, you set specific dates and deadlines, starting from the departure date back to the present. By doing this, you have a clear time line from where you are to where you need to be on the day that the plane takes off.

The next step in project management is to organize your list of all the things that will need to be done for you to get to your goal, the completion of your project. There are two ways to organize a list in project management. The first way is sequential. This is when one step follows another. The first must be done before the second can be started. The second must be completed before the third can be started, and so on. These are often called dependent activities. One depends on the successful completion of another. This is a key point to remember in managing a project of any size.

The second type of activities in project management are parallel or concurrent activities. These are tasks that can be worked on at the same time, separate and apart from other activities. For example, if you are planning a new brochure or newsletter, you could be writing the copy at the same time you are selecting paper stock or gathering possible photographs to illustrate the content.

Once you have the goal in mind and have listed everything that you must do to achieve the goal, and organized everything in terms of whether it is sequential or concurrent, you are ready for the core exercise of effective project management. It is the key to your future in the world of work. It is the process of selection and delegation.

The bigger the project, the more people, the more specialists in different fields, will be required to carry it through to successful completion. Your ability to select the right people and then to delegate effectively to them will determine, as much as any other factor, your success or failure. A mistake in selection or a miscommunication in delegation can be enough to derail the entire project or to set it back, or to have it run over budget.

Many men and women have been able to shoot ahead in their careers by taking on a project and then performing in an exemplary fashion. Others have found themselves bypassed for promotion because when they were given a project to carry out, they did not take it seriously enough, and their lack of results undermined the confidence of their superiors in their abilities. Project management is serious stuff. Almost all problems in business are management problems, and this means project-management problems. This is often why a new manager comes in and replaces everyone on the team. He recognizes that the reason why the job isn’t getting done is probably because the person in charge of the multitask job, manufacturing, sales, distribution, or whatever, is not up to par.

When you build your team, you make a statement about your capability as a manager. As much as 95 percent of your success in the business world will be determined by your ability to select the right people to help you. Most of your problems in business come from attempting to get the job done with difficult, incompetent people.

Your job is to select the very best people available to you who can do the job. Examine a person’s track record carefully. Check references. Talk to other people about the task, and get opinions concerning the individual’s ability to do it in an excellent fashion. Be careful about your choices, and be adamant about assigning key tasks to the very best people. This will save you time and trouble. Once you have selected the individuals to carry out the specific parts of the project, you must delegate effectively to each of them. Assign specific responsibilities for each task necessary to complete the project to specific individuals, each of whom has a deadline as well. Tell each person what is to be done, when it is to be done, what standards of performance you require and what the overall project will look like when it is complete. Leave nothing to chance.The more people know about the what and why of the total job, the more capable they are of carrying out their individual functions.

Lack of clarity is the single greatest contributor to failure in project management. For this reason, it is important that you meet regularly with the members of your team, either individually or together. You keep in touch with them on a regular basis. You keep them informed. You give, and receive, feedback. And the more important the project is, the more you stay on top of it.

Just as it is important for you to think on paper in organizing a project for yourself, it is helpful for you to use a chalkboard or a flip chart when you are meeting with the members of your team. The more visual you can make the project, and the process of achieving the goal, the more likely it is that each task will be completed on schedule and to the standards you have set.

You supervise the project by measuring people’s progress toward their individual deadlines. Your supervision of the project is what makes it all come together. The rule is “Inspect what you expect.” Never assume anything. Remember, Murphy’s Laws were developed by men and women managing projects of various sizes. You know some of these laws: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. However much you budget, it will cost more than you expect. However long you allow, it will take longer than you thought. Of all the things that can go wrong, the worst possible thing will go wrong at the worst possible time.

And, of course, you’ve heard the corollary to Murphy’s Laws: Murphy was an optimist.

Finally, in project management there is always a critical event or limiting step. This is the one thing that absolutely, positively has to be done to a set standard for the project to be successful. It is in this area that you must take personal responsibility and focus your personal attention on making sure that everything is done right. Keep your eyes on the ball, even if you delegate or outsource the task.

You can use project management to develop a new account, to increase your income, to attain a high level of physical health and fitness, to plan a vacation, to move across the country, to start and build a business, to write a book, paint a picture or sail a catamaran around the world. In every case, the proper use of project-management techniques, such as those we have discussed here, can give you the winning edge. It can enable you to kick in the afterburners for your life and your career. The skill of project management will enable you to move ahead further and faster than you ever could without it. Although the steps to project management are simple, the skill of project management is complex, and it is vital to your success.

The cumulative results of your developing the skills of project management will enable you to accomplish bigger and bigger tasks with greater responsibilities and greater income, with greater rewards of all kinds. Project management is a powerful key to the future.

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