Keys to Success: Secrets of The Achievers

Everyone has goals or has set them at some point in their life, goals are what inspire us to better ourselves and the people around us. This applies in all aspects of life, business, family, health, whatever it may be it requires us to become a better version of ourselves. This is the foundation of what creates successful entrepreneurs, anyone who has achieved tremendous success has stuck to their goals.

The process of doing this is not an easy one, it is not a straight road with lights to see where you’re going. It is a testing process of your character, your willpower, and the reason you are setting out to achieve your goal. This is why it is best to develop your “why”, you’ve heard that before, but it is the first and most important step. If your goal is to start a business, why are you entering this specific field? What does the cause mean to you? Whose lives will you be impacting? How will you base selection for your team?

Asking yourself these questions and cementing in your reason for wanting to achieve, will prevent you from quitting. So you’ve got your why, now the how will begin to form in your mind, but what can you expect along the way? 

We know that success isn’t handed out to anyone, it takes time and patience to do anything worthwhile. This may seem straightforward but for many, this process is too much. This is why 80% of people fail their new year's resolutions every year. This has a lot more of an impact on our well-being than one may think. How can you respect yourself if you cannot keep the promises you made yourself? It is disheartening but this is the reality of how the pressure of achieving can get to those without staying power.

Now if you’re interested in being the minority of achievers, and want to overcome these perceived limitations, let's look at what you can do on your journey:

Be Specific

Envision exactly what you want, close your eyes and imagine yourself at the moment where you have achieved your goal, and experience the emotions. This is a powerful tool, visualization helps us figure out what we are trying to do. Simply put, you should be able to explain your goal to a 5-year-old. When we set aimless goals for ourselves, we often lose sight of what it is we are trying to achieve, leading us to throw in the towel. Don’t waste this inspiration, use it to design your ideal outcome.

Don’t Fall For Doubt

When we are looking up a mountain we have to climb, thoughts will bubble up in our heads telling us we can’t do it. Oftentimes even people will tell us that we should lower our expectations, or what we want is impossible. Remember this, impossible for them doesn’t mean impossible for you. If your why is strong enough, you will find ways around obstacles, you just have to trust yourself. This can be a bit more difficult if you are working in a team with someone who is feeding doubt to the rest of the members.

To handle this, lead by example, combat their negativity by feeding them with your willingness to take risks, and watch them start to follow your lead.

Work At It

Procrastination can get the best of us, especially with all the technology and media that we have access to. Commonly, we fall into this trap when our goals don’t inspire us enough to be disciplined. This is a common misconception of success, motivation is temporary, it’s easy to get it done when we are at 100%. Real success is based on what you do on the days you're not motivated when you don’t feel like doing the work.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk weren’t working 9-5 Monday-Friday to become successful. A successful business is not built on the days an entrepreneur feels motivated, it is built by pushing through the hard times, the doubt, and the un-inspired days.

Commit To It

Linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles, Emmanuel Acho has a great quote “the reason most people fail is because they give up what they want most for what they want now”. Put so simply yet accurately pinpointing the reason people give up. This is the case when the goal is not important enough to us, and when the why is not clear. Realize that with success comes sacrifices, you will have to give up the things holding you back and replace them with time invested in yourself.

Be Prepared To Fail

So many times, people give up way too soon on their goals because of one failure. It is important to know that creating success is never a hole in one. You must fail, then learn from your failures and keep trying until you get it right. If everyone gave up after a few failures or even a few hundred failures, we would not have a world as advanced as we do now. There would be no technology, we wouldn’t have great athletes or entrepreneurs. Simply put, failure is your best friend, it will make you more resilient and allow you to become better.

Conclusion

When you set out on a journey to become successful, it can be a lonely and difficult process. You will have to believe not only in what you’re doing but also in yourself. There will be times when your beliefs will be tested, you will feel like you want to quit at points. The best things are created out of struggle, overcoming your mind will separate you from the majority of people. It is this willingness to be different, to try, to take risks that will make you the best version of yourself.

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!

Leadership Essentials: Mistakes Leaders Make

Being a leader is no easy task, it requires an individual capable of handling the pressure to tend to the needs of a team with high emotional intelligence and strategy to succeed. Leaders have a vision for what they want to achieve, it is this vision that creates an environment for collaboration. As a leader, it is very easy to get caught up in assessing the performance of others that we don’t take the time to assess ourselves and our effectiveness.

If leaders do not seem open to feedback, employees won’t tell them their concerns about their effectiveness. This can lead to negative feelings from followers and even cause them to lose sight of what is expected of them. When this is the case, it creates a very negative environment for team members and will inhibit their performance. This is counterproductive to the duties of a leader which is to inspire and utilize team members' skills to accomplish something together. 

Leading teams of people are by no means an easy process, and it will test your communication as well as mental stamina. This position is meant for people who have confidence, grit and maintain respect for the people around them. Just like everyone else, leaders are not perfect, and there are a lot of common mistakes leaders make. Taking into account the general common mistakes leaders make, we can categorize them under two umbrellas:

Leadership Mistake - Not Receiving Feedback

Curiosity, asking questions, effective listening, the hunger to learn is what leads to success. Nobody knows everything, no matter who you are there are things you can learn. This same principle applies even to the highest-ranked leaders: learn what you can improve on and what impacts your team's ability to perform. Leaders often don’t look at themselves as the reason for underperformance, instead, they want to look at who is doing what is wrong on their team.

Before you can assess slacking team members, there must be an open discussion about how you as a leader are creating an environment for your team to do their best work.

Ask questions to your team such as:

1. What are our weak points as an organization?

2. What are our strengths?

3. Do you feel you are receiving adequate resources to perform to the best of your ability?

4. What is something you’d change about our approach?

5. What are the urgent problems we need to take care of?

There are numerous benefits to gain from asking questions like this to team members. It shows that you care about making your organization an effective workplace. This also allows you to get feedback from individuals working under your leadership. I suggest that leaders ask these questions fairly regularly, to make team members feel valued and learn what works/doesn’t work with your current strategies.

Leadership Mistake - Micromanaging

Commonly, leaders will want to oversee how their team members are executing their operations. However, not giving your team breathing room to do their work will be counterproductive in completing their task effectively. Micromanaging tendencies can stem from many places such as not trusting your team, being insecure about a loss of power in decision making, or simply being overly cautious.

It’s important to know that in cases where your team has access to all the necessary resources, micromanaging will only harm the team's ability to work. A common flaw associated with micromanagers is not delegating adequate tasks to team members, which essentially becomes a waste of resources. Your team is there to help. All members share a common vision of achieving a goal.

Advice to anyone who thinks they micromanage would be:

1. Build trust with employees 

2. Develop timelines of leaving the team alone

3. Periodic check-ins

4. Listen to the needs of team members

5. Accept that not everything is perfect

6. Communicate expectations clearly

Applying these will demonstrate your trust in your own decisions to delegate tasks to the right team members. They will also reflect your emotional intelligence as you aren’t getting your ego or lack of trust out of the way. Team members will thrive under a dynamic that allows them to complete tasks to the best of their ability. As the team starts to succeed, their motivation to take on more new challenges will increase and so will their quality of work.

Conclusion

Being a leader does not entail one person doing a job, it requires someone who can make the people who follow them better, to achieve as one. Leading people is not a linear process, it is not a one-size-fits-all and it will challenge you. Whatever endeavors you take on as a leader, always do your best to support your followers and learn as much as you can. 

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!

5 Social Media Marketing Tips To Engage Your Audience

Social media has become a hub for advertising and marketing, brands are receiving mass amounts of engagement as well as being able to directly connect with their audience. The biggest attraction to social media marketing is the open environment that it offers. Brands can interact with their audience daily, on Instagram for example, posts and stories are direct attention grabbers.

Posting on your Instagram daily whether it be posts, reels, or stories, is a portion of their day that your audience dedicates to you every time you post. Think about that, your audience has a moment every day where they focus on you. Who wouldn’t take advantage of that? To get the best out of this opportunity, make sure it is something that will interest them and entice them to look more into what you offer. 

From the perspective of a consumer, brands with a strong social media presence are valuable and will receive the attention they deserve for the volume they produce. To put this statement in perspective, just over 70% of consumers agree that social media is a major driver of brand awareness. This statistic is just in America, social media gives outreach to countries all over the world, you can imagine how much higher this percentage is for that market.

If you want to make your organization appeal more to your audience, then I suggest you look at applying these 5 tips to improve your ability to do so.

Get Active With Responding

Brands always assume that the key to publicity is going viral and generating mass amounts of likes/views. While this is of course a great situation to be in if you’re fortunate, however, social media is a direct access point to engaging with your audience. This means brands tend to use social media as a megaphone when it’s meant to be a walkie-talkie. Get in the comments, respond to direct messages, this is a personal touch that shows the audience you care.

Develop a Personality

Brands engage in Twitter wars occasionally and it is incredibly entertaining. These reflect the personality of the brand, for example, you often see Wendy’s on Twitter being very sassy towards other brands. Or brands responding brutally honest to customer complaints in a funny way. These exchanges bring in a lot of traffic on Twitter and are yet another opportunity for your audience to focus on your brand for free. Now I’m not saying go on Twitter and start bashing other brands, but find a way to incorporate some witty comments that reflect characteristics for how you want to be perceived. 

Use Relevant and Trending Topics

Post about things going on (that are not political) for example if you are a catering service post on National Fettuccine Alfredo Day a picture of some Fettuccine Alfredo and a clever comment. Doing this not only draws attention to your services but also demonstrates that you are fun and in tune with the world. There's always something trending, use your creativity to find a way for these trends to work for you online. 

Use Appropriate Visuals

While you’re keeping up with relevant trends, using images that capture the message you are trying to send drives engagement through the roof. If you utilize your creativity and develop something that gets lots of shares, likes, or retweets, you are putting your brand in the spotlight. Develop something eye-catching or funny, something that will entice someone to say “oh my friends have to see this”. The same rule goes for promotions your brand may be having, if you are a shoe business and you’re having a back-to-school sale, incorporate something on campus. It is the little things that make a big difference, again it’s not about going viral, you simply want to communicate with your audience.

Ask For Feedback 

A sometimes overlooked aspect for brands on social media is being able to ask your audience for reviews and responding to them directly. Believe it or not, you can respond to the negative comments with positivity to show your audience that you care. Furthermore, this will benefit your brand's image by demonstrating that you engage with your audience and value feedback. Getting feedback will allow you to adjust your marketing strategies. You can find new perspectives from your audience and then tailor your approach as you go. 

Conclusion

Social media entails the same principle as the genuine relationships you have day-to-day. You are directly communicating with your audience, engaging in exchanges, and sharing a moment in your day with that individual. From a brand perspective, it is in your best interest to make as much of your audience satisfied as possible. It’s impossible to please everyone and there will be negativity, but you are still representing the brand, respond to situations with that in mind. Social media today creates opportunities that we never had 10-15 years ago. This form of communication and ability to connect with audiences is going to grow more over the coming years. Is your brand prepared to capitalize in this market?

We work with successful companies to increase their net profits using exceptional custom software solutions, contact us here to see how we can help your business grow!