Archive for the ‘Business Coaching & Mentoring’ Category
Walk On The Grass Business Coaching Programme
Monday, December 5th, 2011Walk On The Grass Business Coaching Programme
The Online Business Coaching package is intended for people who want to improve their focus, make the best use of their time and grow their business and profits to their full potential.
Simply complete each session as guided by me as your coach. You will have access to this package as long as your subscriptions continue, and you can choose to cancel at any time.
This package combines online coaching with a regular response from me, enabling you to clarify where you are now, where you want to get to, and practical actions you need to take to get you there. I will prompt you with additional questions, tools and suggestions which will give you insight and further impetus to succeed in your business.
Think of me as your business partner, that person to bounce ideas off, someone who won’t judge your master plan, but who will accompany you on the journey to getting there (maybe testing the reality of some of your assumptions along the way!)
The following outlines the sessions offered to you through the Online Coaching package.
Overview: An introduction to coaching followed by an overview of the package.
About You and Your Business: This will allow me as your coach to get an understanding of the background and history of you and your business.
Where are You Now?: This session will give you a number of questions to think about how effectively you run as a business.
Setting Action Plans: You are asked to work through a number of diagnostic tools to analyse your current situation and determine the timing and order of your subsequent sessions as we begin to identify your specific priorities.
Vision and Brand: This is vital to determine how you want to run your business and the way in which your brand is disseminated throughout your organisation.
Finances: An greater understanding of your financial strategy
Business Planning: Here we determine your exit strategy, and how this impacts on your revenue and sales targets.
Key Performance Indicators: We identify ways to measure the health of your business and help you set targets to keep your business on track.
Keep Your Customers: Given that it is five times more effective to spend money on retaining current customers than to gain new ones, we examine what you are doing to keep your current clients happy.
Marketing: We help you to discover more ways of getting more from the customers you really want and work with you to refine your marketing techniques and introduce you to new ones.
Sales: We examine what stops you getting the customer to sign on the dotted line and what you can do to improve your sales conversion rates.
Time management: Tackling those feelings of being overwhelmed and getting it all done.
Summary: Complete the questionnaire to reflect on the process you have undergone and the impact it has had.
All this for just a one-off cost of £195.00. Ready to get started?
Click here to BOOK now
Do you feel like you are spinning too many plates?
Monday, June 27th, 2011Most business parents know what plate spinning feels like, because you lurch from a busy day at work to home, then more dashing around with the kids, perhaps the occasional argument with the family before cooking, sitting down to eat, with more demands on your time. Finally collapsing into a heap, and watching supercilious know-it-alls on TV, making you feel like you’re a bad parent, an unfit partner and useless in business. Sound familiar?
Oh and not forgetting, to stave off obesity, you are reminded that you need an hours exercise and a calm balanced life as you pack the last biscuit in your mouth from the pack of 12, that were all there, that very morning. Wondering how do kids eat so much and stay thin. Then let’s add the ironing, DIY and helping kids with homework. And for good measure let’s chuck in tomorrows meeting with an important business client and wondering how you can fit eighteen hours of work into eight.
That’s a lot of plates to keep spinning before you even start on the unconscious ones: the worries, concerns and fears that lay silently swirling around your subconscious mind; the report you have to write or the bills you have to pay.
Just stop for a moment before your poor Business Mind explodes and consider what all those plates, that you admirably keep up the air, are actually made of. You see most busy parents will assume, like that video demonstrates, that their plates are fragile and breakable so you are careful not to drop them! This ensures that you stay focused on all your concerns, keeping everything spinning. Yet, not one single plate gets your undivided attention, as you will see in the video as Andy lurches from one to another, keeping them spinning, keeping everyone happy and you exhausted.
Now we know through my own and others psychology research that the quickest way to change your life, is to interrupt the neural pathways. That’s just a big name for how your brain works. You can do this by steering your mind down another track and think differently.
What if all those fears, concerns and worries, were paper plates? Even better, what if some of those plates where just not necessary and you could just stop spinning them and put them on a shelf until you could give them more attention? Or perhaps someone else could spin a few for you, even the kids, they make great plate spinners, you just need to train them? I would imagine that you are even spinning other people’s plates for them, by worrying about things, in their lives that you have no control over.
STOP now before your head comes loose and reflect this week on what plates you are currently spinning. Are they all really necessary? Simply make a list or if you prefer a cognitive behaviour technique, then get yourself a pack of paper plates and write your major plate spinning behaviors on each one.
Decide:
- Which plate, can be put on a shelf until you can give it more attention.
- Which plate, is critical and needs to keep spinning.
- Which plate, could someone else help you with.
- Which plate, really needs taking down and throwing away because it’s nothing you can control.
There are only so many plates that each working parent can spin in their day, especially with your business and family demands so take time to look at your plate spinning activities because it will give you a real insight and help you to focus on what really matters, and spend more time on the important plates.
Shrink Nights
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011The girls night in has been given a fabulous new makeover.
Women make great listeners but now traditional get togethers are set to become more solution focussed with someone who can really help you with your issues. (more…)
What Is Your Destination?
Friday, November 12th, 2010
What's Your Press Release?
Take a few moments and imagine it’s April 2011 and the local newspaper has just written an article about your Business, what does it say?
- What would you want it to say?
- What would make you say ‘Wow’ we did that!
- By April 2011, What have you achieved?
If you know exactly what that press article looks like, great, get it down on paper and share it with your team or your friends. If you don’t then by the week let your mind develop a clearer vision because it will both help and amaze your team when they achieve it.
In my experience of decades successfully working in the corporate industry and as a speaker helping leaders improve their emotional intelligence, I know we often spend far too much time thinking about the day to day tasks we need to do before we know what our end goal is, and something magical happens when we know the destination, the people around us have a route to follow, they know what to focus their attention and efforts on.
Imagine if you were to get into a taxi today; the first answer the taxi driver would want to know is ‘Where are you going mate’ . At which point you would tell them and the trip would begin.
Re-wind that tape and think about it if you will, getting into that same taxi and telling the driver to just drive, I’m sure he would be happy to oblige but it would be expensive in many ways:
- It would waste your valuable time,
- It would definitely waste your money and
- And it would be wasteful to the quality of your life or business, after all who wants to stay in a car all the time.
I wrote my own press release in November 2009 and my family thought it was hilarious and that was for January 2010 and the launch of my first book.
My teenagers saw this news article on the notice board and were confused. “Mum you haven’t even written a book let alone got it in the paper, are you seeing imaginary ducks as well?”. I reassured them that I was going to start the following week and they thought it was really funny but strangely curious in case I was serious.
The following week I did start writing and within 6 weeks it was complete, 4 weeks after that it was edited and in print and my book ‘Walk On The Grass’ was a reality. The press release exceeded even my expectations when it appeared in 45 papers both in the UK and Europe
The family still laughed but this time it was more in shock.
It’s very important to know what your business will look like in the future, it will help you focus on what you want to achieve and will help your team to support you in the process. Your mission statement is important but the old saying a picture paints a thousand words, is still very true today.
If I were to ask each of your team what their picture of the business looks like, it would be different for each person; some may focus on making money, others on achievement and the remaining people perhaps the kudos, just being part of it.
It will only help you if your team know where they are going with it, it helps with scheduling time, setting deadlines and recognising achievements on the way and do you know you can also do the same for yourself personally with your career goals.
I know you are inundated with school work as well as the Young Enterprise programme and that’s why I’ll make it easy, you can download a simple newspaper template from my website at http://bit.ly/YourDestination
Even better like most Managers– DELEGATE – get someone to create it for you and give them the content.
Once you have a picture of your business and the words that say what you have achieved in April 2011 then the rest of the jigsaw will start to fall into place.
Because as you grow your business you know what it looks like, and that vision may develop further as you go on.
Let me leave you with one final thought and that is to start the process, what is Your Company’s Best Press Release for April 2011?
Clear Out The Creativity Clutter
Friday, August 27th, 2010I’m not an artist for a living but I’ve just dropped off my first publically viewed painting at an art exhibition and the proudest moment was when the organiser said to me ‘what a fabulous painting, how much is it, I could see that on my wall’. I was dumfounded, my first venture into the big wide world of Art. I actually didn’t care if I didn’t sell it, that recognition was firmly captured in my self esteem bank.
When I was younger I used to love to paint and draw and in fact anything creative, as do many children but by the time I was 20 and ensconced in Art College, the doubts had started to set in. I absorbed comments from Teachers such as ’You’ll never make a painter’ and sure enough I never got much better, hanging on to the belief that it was all too difficult and out of reach. My self-belief reinforced the fact that I can’t paint so therefore I didn’t, but after twenty five years of ‘not being able to paint’ when I wrote my book ‘Walk On The Grass’ to encourage everyone to get more creative, I decided I was going to break the mould and started to play. The thing about any art is the more you play the better you become at it and the more fun you have doing it; the less anyones opinion actually matters.
So my simple tip for this month is to get creative again but before you do clear out some of the clutter in your mind first.
- Recognise if you have let one unconstructive statement destroy your confidence, you are not a sponge so don’t absorb what you don’t want.
- Try not to compare yourself to Rembrandt or any other artist for that matter, it’s a hard act to follow so be unique. Everything you do may not be perfect first time but you’ll have some happy accidents along the way.
- Find a creative place in your home and turn it into your inspiration den, you need space to be creative.
- Set yourself a time to be creative and work against the clock, time pressure has a way of getting your sub-conscious involved very quickly and inspiring you.
- If you can’t think what you could paint, then use colours to paint how you feel, and break a few rules, put the brush down and get your fingers in. It was the best thing I ever did and so much easier to express feelings.
Expressive creativity for me is about communication, perhaps it’s painting or sculpting but it can shake up your solution based creativity which is what you need when you are looking for answers to issues or problems at work or at home. So wade in and have a go, the only thing you have to lose is the self-belief that keeps you where you are now.
I’m going to the Art Exhibition tonight to see my painting hung on a wall and it will be such a proud moment for me, it’s not about selling it, it is about recognising how easy it is to change your beliefs and how many people are still stuck with such a common belief that they can’t paint.
Remember you did paint at one time in your life so when did you forget?
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