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As the owner of a flourishing business, you need to
cultivate three essential skills. While emphasis is
often given to skills like reading and analyzing
financial statements and how to sell with conviction,
the following three skills are less spoken about and
yet ultimately mark the difference between someone who
is self-employed and a true visionary leader. All
great business people must know how to discern a good
deal from a bad deal and act on that decision, when to
listen to their gut and how to set priorities. This
boils down to the ability to think, feel and act.
These three skills are not often addressed in a
business class or even in most MBA programs thus
cultivating them will truly put you among the business
elite. We'll briefly explore why each of these is
important and how to apply each skill to making your
business flourish.
How to think through critical decision making:
You must know how to analyze a situation, whether it
is real or imagined, with past numbers or projected
figures and see the business sense of it, or the lack
thereof. This is critical thinking. You must be able
to do this despite knowing little about a situation.
The ability to make good decisions, given often
limited information, is a skill to cultivate in order
to become a master CEO. You also need to be the
strategic thinker, the marketing mastermind and the
visionary. Ultimately your plan should be to stop
doing the minutia that runs the business and delegate
those tasks to competent employees that you can trust.
Then you can turn your role into what it should be:
Chief Decision Maker.
Your mind should be focused on
thinking about paving the future for your company.
Making critical decisions includes what to add or take
away from the produce or service mix, how industry
trends will affect your market and how to take
advantage of them. Being able to look at a market
opportunity and decide what will generate more revenue
for your business, how to supply an underserved niche,
cultivate more loyalty and competitive advantage is
your job as CEO.
Boldness and decisiveness are rare and thus valuable
skills. Many companies fail not by making the wrong
decisions but by not making decisions at all. Those
who make decisions and move forward are always in the
power position compared to those who wait and see.
This is the contrast between a victim mentality and a
victor mentality. Fear of being wrong stops many
people from doing anything, but being wrong is just an
illusion. There is no wrong, there are only decisions
and lessons learned and new decisions. There are
people who make things happen and people who let
things happen, and history shows the winners are the
ones who make decisions.
How to feel using your intuition:
If you are not pleased with how things are going in
your business, you need learn to trust your feelings
and intuitions more. Some say that a finely tuned
intuition can make great improvement in one's decision
making effectiveness. Our bodies sometimes know
things that our minds don't. If you get too caught up
in your head you could be keeping yourself from
capitalizing on the inner wisdom that lies within your
body. In order to improve how you make decisions,
make sure that you add in a gut check to your process.
You brought the business this far, so your gut
instincts have a lot of validity. Making a decision
in your business inherently includes making a guess or
prediction about the future, which no data can predict
accurately. If we were able to predict the future
100% accurately using just data from the past,
Las Vegas
and
Wall Street would be very different places.
As it is, we are always uncertain about the future,
and just relying on facts is often not enough. You
must learn to tap into your inner powers. To do this
try meditating on a problem or issue that you are
trying to solve. Go to a quite place with no
distractions and allow yourself to just sit quietly
for 30 minutes. Clear your mind of all your worries
and concerns and just sit peacefully. You will find
that the answer or solution will come into your mind
at after about 20-30 minutes of meditation. It will
be as if it came from above. The more you do on a
regular basis you will become more in tune with your
own inner wisdom and will be able to leverage this
sixth sense as a powerful advantage in business and in
life. If your gut instinct is that you don't
understand a problem or a realm of your business and
you need outside help, trust that instinct and ask for
help either from within your company or from the
outside. You know more that you think you do and this
will become apparent after you practice developing
your intuition. Remember to use your feelings as well
as your head when making decisions.
How to act by setting priorities and delegating:
This skill is really two skills but in order for you
to perfect them they should be looked at as a
coordinated effort. As a business owner, you've got a
lot on your plate, and you always will, so learning to
prioritize is essential. You will quickly see that
you cannot handle everything on your list. So, you
have a choice; you can either not do the things on the
bottom of your list, or you can find others to do them
for you, and that is a lot of what running a business
and creating an entity of business value is all about.
You must know the value of everything you do and take
care of your high value activities first.
The activities deemed lower in value are not necessarily
activities that are not worth doing, they are just not
worth you doing them. If these activities can be
performed effectively by someone else and still net
out more value for the business in return and they are
a strategic fit for your focused strategy of the
business, then they should be delegated. To delegate
effectively you must learn how to explain for
understanding. For higher level activities, you must
also be able let go, explaining the current and
desired state and then trusting the intellect of the
other person(s) to build the bridge that will fill in
the middle.
The more you learn to let go, the more
you will be able to grow your business. If you do not
learn to do this, you will put a ceiling on your own
results. Sure it is true that your employees might
let you down or drop the ball on a task, but the same
is true of you if you are trying to do everything for
the business. Put time and effort into finding smart,
hard-working employees and empower them to do what
they do best. The possibility that your employee
will make a mistake is the same as the possibility
that you will make a mistake. Therefore it will be
more lucrative for the business in the long run to
allow your employees to do these essential tasks while
you focus on running the business.
By employing these three essential skills everyday
when running your business you are bound to see
dramatic and exciting results that will allow your
business to flourish and that is what being an
entrepreneur is all about. For more information on
you how you can improve your business, visit
www.flourishingbusiness.com
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