Stop Kidding yourself

Tuesday 2nd February 2010

My thought is:“Good plans shape good decisions. That’s why good planning helps to make visions, dreams & goals come true.”

Time wastingTime is a moving constant. When each minute passes if we “don’t use it, we lose it”. All the years I have been in business and for the companies I’ve worked for, if I haven’t worked, I didn’t get paid. This by the way is the same when working for yourself, as I certainly know. With this in mind, how many of us have shirked our responsibility and stolen “TIME OUT” in the working day? (Either to the company we work for or our families but more importantly, to ourselves).

Over 30 years ago a friend of mine and I had a bet. I said that you could go into an afternoon cinema performance in the interval and shout out; “Is there a SALESMAN in the house?” I said to him that 20% of the audience would be salespersons, my friend said no way. We did it at the old Odeon Cinema in Liverpool. Guess what, yes you’ve got it, in actual fact it was over 30%.The point I’m trying to make is that during our working day we are ALL GUILTY of wasting valuable and productive business enhancing TIME.
Good plans shape good decisionsWe all know the statement; “Failure-to-Plan is just Planning-to-Fail”. I have over the years thought about this particular saying on many occasions and have on more times than I care to remember mentioned it to salespeople and in many workshops all over the United Kingdom. It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who only pay lip service to it. Why? I believe that the reason is we don’t have the time to plan our day or we can’t be bothered to make the time to do it.

Inconsequential activities

One of the things I try to get delegates in my workshops and indeed over the distant learning courses to do is to monitor themselves during the working day, the week and the month. Honestly you will be surprised the time that is spent doing inconsequential activities and things that are non-productive in the daily routine of the business. What we need to start doing is to monitor our productivity, e.g. monitoring our time during the working hours. For instance on a normal working day how many times:
Do we look at our e-mails?

Are we talking to people around us, with nothing in particular in mind?

Spend answering telephone calls that are non-productive to the business?

What we should be doing is to prioritise our time during the working day!

Plan-to-Succeed

Over the years I have had many “visions and dreams” and on numerous occasions many people have said to me “That will never work”. Ask any successful business person how they started out in business. They will tell you “I had an idea”. In other words, they had a vision, a dream and from that they set a plan into motion. There are “dream thieves”, who love nothing better than to take away the would-be entrepreneur’s dreams, sometimes, for no other reason than jealousy.These same entrepreneurs will always “Plan-to-Succeed”. Why? Because that is the way they have forced themselves to work, they do not “fail-to-plan they plan-to-win”

You should now try to be:PRO-ACTIVE This means you have control of what you want to do with your “visions & dreams. This is your desire, this alone means that you will then become “master of your own destiny”NotRE-ACTIVE When you have to re-act to other people, you have no control of the direction it will take you in. Generally this is because you have not been able to plan things, not necessarily because you failed to plan but because you had to react to or for some other outside influence. It could very well be through the fear and the circumstances that are happening around you. So you should take stock and “Stop re-acting to what is happening”.

You may think that I make it sound so simple and easy, believe me, I have been there. In my short life of 66 plus years, I’ve been made redundant, lost businesses, sold and bought businesses and lost a property to a mortgage company and also been divorced but I have always learned by those adversities.
In October 2004 I had a major heart attack followed by a quadruple By-Pass. Then in 2007 was I diagnosed with Chronic Myeloid leukaemia (CML) and this year they added on, type 2 diabetes for good measure!

One thing I have never forgotten for long is the insatiable strength I have in NEVER GIVING UP on anything, if I can possibly help it. So I do think I can safely speak with some knowledge. Something that I’ve learned is that when you think you can go no further down, there is always someone who is far below where you are at the moment.
So think positive and start being “PRO-ACTIVE” in the way you are thinking at the present. Start planning what you need and want, put it down on paper and keep reading it and looking to succeed at all times. One thing that I’ve learned later in life (I wish I had listened earlier) is that help is there, it is up to you to reach out and take it with both hands. The door is there, it’s up to you to turn the key to go in.

Geoffrey Prince runs BSB Masterclasses in a few selective business subjects. Some are “Half day workshops” and some of them are over the Internet as distance learning courses.He also sets aside time to talk over Skype at: geoffrey.prince when you become one of his students, by booking time. Follow me at my WebLog: http://www.geoffreyprince.com