April 11, 2018 by BarbStuhlemmer Leave a Comment

Abundance Is NOT a Destination

If you think you can “get to abundance” by using the tools, teachings, and tricks of the gurus, profits, and spiritual guides you have learned from over the years, you will be wrong. Abundance is not a destination. Without abundance, you cannot have abundance.

SanDiego-DistractingView — Without abundance, you cannot have abundance.

This morning while meditating, at my girlfriends home in San Diego California, I was going through my list of things I was grateful for. As a Canadian that had just left the temperatures of a cold spring (zero degrees Celsius) for the warmth of California, I was truly grateful. But, as I spent more time thinking about the gift of having the opportunity to actually make the trip, I was struck by the idea that I was not moving towards abundance, or trying to reach an abundant life, but that I had abundance and I was taking advantage of it.

You might be thinking, “well that is all good for you, you can afford to travel.” Well here’s my dirty little secret. I help my clients make millions of dollars more than I make for myself. I have 4 kids at home (all teens and older), a commitment to the college for teaching, a husband that is tied to a job, and many payments that make it difficult to allocate money to travel, for business or personal use. It wasn’t that long ago that I had to work hard not to appear desperate when I was showing up at networking meetings or on my sales calls. I needed the work and “being” abundant was not even something I understood.

Abundance is not the things we wear on the outside, it is the feeling we have on the inside. Abundance is not a thing you can pay for, collect, own, or gift to someone else. You cannot give away abundance any easier than you can purchase it.

So if abundance is not a place you can plan on getting to, nor an item you can own, what it is? It is a mindset of gratitude and a state of being that you must master. Abundance is the ability to be grateful for the food on the table, a roof over your head, clothes for your kids, and a way to pay your bills. It is also the ability to appreciate the gift of friendship, a sunrise, a great meal, the best things about your marriage, and love that fills your life. It is purpose and service and accomplishment and fulfillment. Being abundant is about having both the things that you can and cannot purchase.

To become abundant you must first feel abundant. The only way to feel abundant is to be truly grateful for the things you currently have, no matter how minimal you initially feel that is. When you feel abundant you change and you show up differently for your sales calls, networking, in your client meetings, with your friends, and any place you are. Abundance is who you are not where you are. Don’t wait to take advantage of what you already have. Be abundant now and attract more to your life.

Sound too ‘hokey’? Try gratitude every day for a month, be actively focused on your work, and then let me know if you are attracting more to your business and your life.

September 20, 2017 by BarbStuhlemmer Leave a Comment

The Decision Matrix – Making Decisions Easier

Doors_decision

In my book the Entrepreneur Awakening – Making a Move from Employee to Business Owner I describe several rules and tools of decision-making. One tool I use all the time for helping people make any type of decision is the Decision Matrix.

The decision matrix is basically a way to evaluate your choices and their potential effect on your values. You get a score for each decision that will more clearly reflect how you feel about the option and how it may affect your life.

To use this tool, you need to know all of your options and all of the possible outcomes. I recommend you brainstorm ideas with a friend, colleague, or your accountability partners to ensure you get the full picture of what’s available.

The important point to recognize is that the numbers only apply to you and no one else. It is your decision and your outcome.

Start by drawing a table with five or more columns and rows. Down the left side of the matrix are the items that are important you and that will affect your decision. For example:

Avoid working on weekends.
Must be available to pick up kids when the husband is on shifts.
Cannot afford to buy a second car.
Pays well

Or other items about your business and your life that will be affected by the decision.

Across the top of the matrix is a list of all your options. When using this type of matrix, you must have more than two options. Look for all of the outcomes that could apply to you so you get a broad understanding of your expectations and your needs. For example:

Work from home office for self
Work from home office for someone else
Commute to city for job

Now we look at how each of your options affects each item that is important to you and rate it out of 10. For example:

“Commute to the city for a job” vs “be available to pick up kids” is likely less valuable to your desired outcome so you would rate it lower.

“Commute to the city for a job” vs “Pays well” is likely more in line with your desired outcome.

Use a higher number for combinations that are more desirable and a lower number for combinations that are less desirable.

	Work from home office for self	Work from home office for someone else	Commute to city for job
Don’t work on weekends	2	4	10
Pick up Kids	10	8	2
Must pay for a second car	10	8	2
Pays well initially	2	7	9
Unlimited potential income	10	1	1
Totals	34	28	24

When you have completed the evaluation you simply need to add up the totals for your options. After doing the tally some options become front-runners and some are easily removed from the list.

This does not make your decision for you, it shows you what you see as valuable and how you rate your options against what is valuable to you in your life. If you still want to take the option that rates the lowest, then you need to justify that choice. When you do, you will likely have another “item that is important to you” to put in your matrix.

Check out my book for another decision tool and the other rules of decision-making.

Entrepreneur Awakening

Making the Move From Employee to Business Owner.

Now on Amazon (also in Kindle format)

December 22, 2016 by BarbStuhlemmer Leave a Comment

Characteristics of an Entrepreneur – Do you have P.O.P.?

Restaurant small business

As Entrepreneurs, there are so many things we need to know and do it sometimes feels like an impossible goal to actually be the person we want to be and serve all the people we want to serve.

Do you ever have this happen? When working hard to create something of value:

you feel overwhelmed by the possibilities and say to yourself, “this won’t work.”
you sell, but not consistently, and think, “this is not a big enough market.”
you have amazing feedback from clients but still believe, “I’m not worth more.”
you need more resources, money, feedback, insights, research, but you feel, “I’m not enough!”

Being an entrepreneur is not a ‘day job’, it is a lifestyle. Although there are a lot of skills required to run a business (not all of them need to be yours), there are considerably fewer characteristics that make a great entrepreneur and even less that are expressed in the typical business owner. If you are worried you are not qualified to be an entrepreneur because you don’t know HTML or you cannot manage an online Twitter account, then let me show you that you likely are. The answer is “P.O.P” and I don’t mean soda.

There are hundreds of skills required to run a business, most of which we can hire out. To be an entrepreneur we may have about a dozen characteristics, like vision, big-picture thinker, people orientated, goal-driven, and others. In a career as an employee, these are called our ‘soft-skills’. In the 1980’s being the ‘knowledge holder’ gave you the top management spot. Having soft-skills were not as valuable. Today, in an age when information is widely available to everyone, the one holding the knowledge is only average, not exceptional. The soft-skills is what makes a great employee and a great business owner. Here are the three characteristics most displayed by entrepreneurs who create and maintain a successful business as identified in by Ron Knowles and Chris Castillo in their textbook “Small Business An Entrepreneur’s Plan“.

P.O.P goes the entrepreneurial engine.

Passionate

This one seems obvious and is often not looked at as a positive characteristic. If you have ever heard someone say, “well, she is just so caught up in her own world” or “she thinks everyone is interested, she’ll never make that work.” For outsiders, our passion can seem outrageous, but let me assure you, without a strong connection to your passion you will not survive in business. It is because of passion, whether it be for the delivery of the service, the implementation of ideas, the development of products, or the management of the business, that an entrepreneur stays the course. It is very hard to do the tough work inside a business when it takes more than 8 hours a day or more money than you expect, to stay the course for years. Without a driving connection to your own purpose, which comes out of your passions, your business will not last long enough to be worth anything you or to others.

Opportunistic

Successful entrepreneurs see opportunities everywhere. Initially, you may only see the opportunity connected to your passion, but as you build this ‘muscle’ you will start seeing possibilities everywhere. Sometimes, seeing opportunity everywhere is to the detriment of the owner, as opportunities can drag a person in many directions if they are all pursued at the same time. If you see possibilities for new products from a conversation with a client or a new market because of a visit to a city during your vacation, you are already using this skill. Be open to all ideas as they come to you and create a process to help you evaluate to implement now, later, or not at all.

Persistent

The overnight success is usually at 10-year journey full of hard work, failures, steps backward, and small wins. It is because of passion that a successful entrepreneur stays the course. It is the opportunities that come from failure that hone the focus of a business to its most successful. Only a true entrepreneur is willing to pick up the pieces after a loss and make it work for them. If you want to be in business for yourself for a long time then you must be willing to be in your business for a long time. Learn how to ride out the troubles, change direction when it makes sense, and take advantage of the tides of opportunity that will come along.

Yes, you may have to learn a lot and implement new skills you never thought you would need to know, but if you really want to be in business for yourself 10 years from now you need to have P.O.P. Check in with yourself, get a friend to help you, or hire a business coach to help you identify your P.O.P. and align your business.

November 10, 2016 by BarbStuhlemmer Leave a Comment

Why You Need to Be Willing to Be Different

Red door opening on school hallway

Our industrial educated brain will tell us what it thinks we need to hear to keep us safe. It does not want us to get hurt, whether physical, emotionally, or spiritually and it will stop us from taking the risks necessary to make change happen. Don’t be too hard on yourself for thinking this way, we, in the western world, are the result of an education system that was developed to create an army of compliant workers for an industrial and manufacturing workforce to service a society focused on consumption.

The Disease

I did not fully understand this concept until quite recently. The start of this understanding came when I saw a re-run of ‘leave it to Beaver’. In this short piece, I watched June Cleaver, the mother, make sandwiches for her son and his friends. She individually wrapped each sandwich in cellophane, put them on a plate and walked them out to the driveway where the boys were playing basketball, about 25 feet away. The idea that you could now buy something, use it, and throw it away with no concern for the impact this behaviour had on our society, the economy, or the environment, was the start of the trend to buy-buy-buy. If we are not buying, our economies are declining. Our education system has taught us to work hard – get a good education – follow the rules – put in your time AND you will be rewarded with pay to buy new things. This mentality is changing, but it is hard to change 100 years of social education with 14+ years of individual education.

The Cure

Entrepreneurism is one of the best cures for this fear of non-compliance. Becoming an entrepreneur gives a perspective that has less fear around fitting in. It rewards the risky behaviour of not following the education plan. More schools are offering entrepreneurship as a course or a full program. There is a huge challenge with this as it is known that to be fully entrepreneurial you need to be free to take action, make ‘It’ happen, envision, create, implement, and sell. If a student is in school and envisions an opportunity, how can they follow through without leaving school? Society still looks down on not finishing school. If they get a business idea but stay in school to finish, it is likely they will fail at entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur must learn to take action, but with all the work in school, it is hard to do both. A very difficult balance.

For schools hoping to create a larger pool of entrepreneurs, my feeling is that we must have shorter, more intensive programs lead and taught by entrepreneurs.

For students wanting to take entrepreneurship in school, look for programs that encourage early graduation when the creation of your business is achieved.

The Challenge

Understand that a school is technically a business. It has a requirement to keep their funding in place and that is based on this outdated mandate to fill their programs. They use these metrics to determine their success:

The number of ‘funding units’ (you) in each program.
The program’s successful track record for job placement.

This makes me ask:

If a program, like entrepreneurship, cannot show success by job placement then what metrics will ensure capacity enrollment?
If a program is not well attended because less money is put on marketing it, will it be cut even if it is a successful global trend?
What can we use to measure successful graduation from a non-industrial focused program like entrepreneurship?

There is a fear within the education system that stops people from making a serious change. A change that is needed to support the transition of our students into fearless entrepreneurs.

If two things changed in these systems everything might change.

The structure of education to maintain income cannot stop a new entrepreneur from creating and starting a business – it must support it.
Entrepreneurism cannot be taught by teachers that have never been entrepreneurs.

A quick story to demonstrate this mismatched mentality.

I was having dinner at a friend’s one night. She had invited another couple and they were both very intelligent, well education and working in the education system at the post-secondary level. We were discussing entrance requirements and teacher education levels when I said something that did not sit well with her, a Ph.D. candidate. I asked, ‘why is there a requirement for a teacher at a college level in a non-degree program to have a masters’ degree?” She clearly became defensive and said, “If the student decides that they want to go on to get a general degree or a masters’ degree it will make the path easier.

I was so surprised that the focus of education was to continue to sell more education instead of quality, skills-matched training required by the students for their life.

We are educating our students to feel the need to purchase more education so they can feel worthy to participate in the workforce. But this should not be true for entrepreneurs. They will never feel good enough if there is always something they need to complete before they start their business. This will lead to perfection paralysis, the inability to start something because they are not 100% ready.

Let’s teach our students to think slowly, deliberately about their path, and plan with confidence so that they can do what they envision can be done.

They need to think slow about their implementation and be quick to use their abilities. They need to be free of the industrial fear of being different and free to change their direction without finishing what they started so they can be open to successful change and opportunity.

Want to be truly successful? Use your advisory board to leverage your knowledge.

Get your Free seat in one of our Booster Meetings.

October 20, 2016 by BarbStuhlemmer 1 Comment

How to Schedule Your “To Do” Work to Ensure it Gets Done

"to do" list and calendar — Your “To Do” List

When we have a lot to do it can feel very overwhelming. Being overwhelmed can make us procrastinate completing our important work and stop our small business growth plans. Understanding the small business strategies that will help us to get started, and the steps that follow, are not always clear. Sometimes when we don’t know the tasks, we miss deadlines, deliver incomplete work, or get the work wrong. It does not help our credibility and does not help us successfully complete our own projects. I am a very linear thinker but I know without some special tricks, simply having a list is not enough for me to get all the tasks complete, right, and on time.

Create The Steps

Before you can use any tricks to help you complete your “To Do” list it is important to know what the tasks are that need to be completed. When I start a new project I spend time discovering what needs to get done. Knowing the “big picture” result does not give you the small steps to get to the finish. This is one of the key reasons we can picture our bigger, more successful business, but we cannot figure out what we need to do next to get there.

1. Develop the Idea

Before you start writing out the steps, fully develop the idea of what the competed project looks like. Know what you want to have at the end of the work. Then work backwards. For example: If you want to create a newsletter, you will start with the results.

RESULTS – I will have a newsletter that delivers an article I write, information about my upcoming events, a section that highlights other events or people in our industry and a link to my free gift. I will send out this newsletter once a month using a software program that can maintain a database of people that sign up for my newsletter.

OK so now you know the result, next work backwards in bullet points.

software with database
- research which one I want to use
design the newsletter for the software
- find someone that is an expert at the software
- hire this person to create the template and set up the opt-in
- decide if I am going to look after the software going forward or have this person maintain it for me.
Have a location where my articles are available online
- Create a blog
Create a free gift
- put the gift online and create a signup page (or other sales process to capture contacts)
Create a list of people or industry specific groups of interest to my readers
Create my marketing calendar for upcoming events
etc.

I simply started at the end of the RESULTS paragraph and read it backwards to create the list above.

2. Get Feedback

Take your idea and your list to someone that you trust and that has the ability to understand your goals. Ask them to help you evaluate the idea and the list. I have found that after I get input from others, there is always something I did not see, or could not see, because I am so close to the idea. Ideas, like children, are all beautiful in the eyes of their parents. Beauty is not enough to be successful so get someone to help you discover the challenges in your idea and add their tasks to your list.

Make it Visual

I’m going to date myself here, but do remember the K-Mart Flashing Blue Light Special? I was only a kid, but I remember when they would announce the special over the speakers and we’d hunt the store for the blue flashing light. Not everyone is a visual learner, but, unless you are visually impaired, you will respond to visual input as a way to direct your focus. It can be a bad thing when it is your email popping into your inbox every 30 seconds, or a good thing when you can easily see what has to happen next in a process that leads to the completion of your goals.

Here are my favourite ways to visually capture my “To Do” list.

Simply create a list. Usually I start by writing it out (see “Develop the Idea” above), but I know I will not check the hand-written paper so I like to put the list into my Outlook calendar. I can electronically cross tasks off as I complete them.
Put the individual tasks into the calendar. If there are hundreds this may be too arduous but if you have 5-10 tasks, you could easily add a task or appointment into your calendar with deadline reminders.
Create Mind-mapping strategies to represent the project. For the creative mind, it is more helpful to have something less analytical and linear. I had a client use an info-graphic instead of a proposal and it was brilliant. It worked for her style of thinking. Be creative don’t just do what other do, including me.
For marketing I have a year-long calendar that is on the wall above my computer. I can look up at any time and see when and what I have something booked. For my “To Do” list I decided to try something different. The image you see above is an Excel calendar. I used a template and created a 12 month document where I could put the steps directly into the dates. It will not remind me automatically, but I printed out a couple of months and use it to sketch additional tasks and new changes. It is very tactical.

NOTE – If you want the Excel calendar template please let me know and I will email it to you. (barb@theceoelite.com)

For my day-to-day “To Do” lists I use a large sticky notepad. I can get 30 tasks on the sheet. I put the tasks down in order as I get them, then put a star beside something that has to be completed today. It sits on my desk, directly in between me and my computer.
Put the list on an sticky note app on your phone. This way you are never without your “To Do” list. If you bump into someone that may have some insight into your challenges, you can easily pull it out to discuss your process.

You don’t have to use technology, you simply have to have the steps somewhere that you will see it and be reminded and refocused on your goals.

P.S. Obviously having an auditory reminder will add to your success, so go ahead and add a reminder that will not only visually come up on your desktop or cell, but will also make a sound. The more ways you can keep your tasks in front of you, the easier it will be to complete them.

NOTE – Creating your lists should not take longer than actually doing the tasks. The bigger the project the more time I put into my “To Do” list for the tasks in the project, but I don’t spend hours on it. Your visual lists should help you stay on track, not add additional work you will procrastinate doing. Find the type of support system that works best for you and use it.

Have Accountability

Your virtual accountability is your calendar notifications. You can snooze the task, but if you do not complete the task it will continue to pop up on your screen. This is helpful. If you really want to pump-up your success rate, get someone else to hold you accountable. Arrange to have someone connect with you weekly and ask you about your progress. I guarantee you will be much more likely to show up for those calls with good news rather than excuses, especially if the person is someone you look up to and respect for their accomplishments.

If you want to ensure you get your work done, and your projects are completed on time, you have to know when you are doing the work, and what the tasks are that need to be completed. Hoping to reach a goal because you can see the result may be possible for a one-person business with no aspirations for significant business growth, but it will destroy a growing business.

If you have an opinion or want to share your best tips for managing a “To Do” list, please put it in the comments below. Also, If you want the template for the Excel calendar I used above, let me know and I will email it to you.