Fear

How do we feel inside about our own abilities to succeed? Are we afraid of failure or of our own capabilities to be successful? The fear of failure can paralyze us to the point that we cannot succeed in spite of our abilities and our methods of work. We must not allow our own fears to cloud our vision and delay or prevent our move forward.

Last week, in discussing skeptics, we touched on how other people in our lives can darken our insight and prevent us from achieving success. We must have faith in ourselves and in our abilities to work towards success. We cannot allow those who are jealous of our success and the ability to rise above their levels of attainment, or failure, to hold us back in our work towards our future achievement.

We must believe in ourselves. In an interview before he won the Super Bowl, a victory he guaranteed, Joe Namath said that if we don’t believe in ourselves, no one else will. We must believe that we are the best at what we do, no matter what it is. We must believe that we provide the best service or product possible and that we are the best person to provide that product or service.

What if we meet someone who may be at the same level as we are, or even better? We must then “step up” what we do or what we market. We need to always improve constantly, not only in our product or service, but in our marketing. We must always be learning, using what we learn to better whatever we do. We cannot allow our fear to burden us and slow us down. Constant improvement must be the norm.

Fear can take many forms and appear in many places. We need to recognize fear in our marketing and our learning. Do not be afraid to try something new that has never been part of our package before, especially in our marketing. Do not allow fear to land us in a rut. Attempting something that we have learned may produce something new in our goals. Who knows, maybe we learn something else new in the results.

So where do we go for someone’s opinion on these new approaches that we can try or to review the results? The best place to gain this help is from our networking partners. We have built networking relationships with others who share our visions and our dreams. Who better to ask for advice about new approaches and to help us evaluate the results than our partners. Then help them try some new approaches themselves.

Sometimes we can partner with our peers and try new approaches together. It is always better to travel a new road with a friend, someone who shares our fear and helps us conquer it. When we attempt anything new, companionship with others makes us braver, more apt to move forward confidently, not prone to giving up before success can be achieved. Partnerships can bring us all success together.

Fear can be very intimidating. Being afraid of failure will prevent us from achieving the success that we all can attain. We cannot allow our fears to prevent us from sharing our methods to achieve success with others with whom we have formed our networking partnerships and relationships. We cannot be fearful of trying new things, venturing into places where we have never traveled, even though others try to tell us “better”.

Please leave me your comments, or email me at Jim@JimTeasley.com, or call me at 360-314-8691. Believe in yourself and your partners, moving towards success together in spite of your fears, your doubts, and even the skeptics who want to hold you back.

Skeptics

The idea of reaching out and helping others realize their dreams resulted in several calls about those who do just the opposite. These people do their best to make their acquaintances “see the light” and make them understand that they will never realize their dreams, especially by means of the path that they have chosen. They tell their “friends” that they aren’t seeing the truth and “that won’t really work”, whatever “that” is.

These people attempt to convince us that we will never be able to rise to the level to which we aspire and that the means which we may have chosen to succeed on that journey is not reality. They will cajole, argue, and make fun of us for our dreams and claim to know what we should do.

Actually these people are afraid that if we dream of bettering our status in life, and actually attain that dream or that success, we will see them for what they really are, skeptics who don’t have our best interests at heart. We cannot allow ourselves to be held back by these people, those who doubt that dreams can come true and that we can accomplish our dreams.

These people are the “hangers-on” who want to ride on our coattails for the rest of our lives, if we allow them to do so, all the time telling us how we will fail. They are the people will take from us without ever giving to other people and will sap our energy from us. They do not want to be proven wrong for that would mean that they don’t know, or want, what is best for us.

These people are full of negative karma, and they will poison our minds, hearts, and souls. They will drain us of our ambition and our drive to success. They do not have our best interests at heart nor do they care about giving to give. They only want to prove themselves right by crushing our dreams and our efforts to accomplish those dreams.

They always have someone who told them how life should be lived (which is opposite from what we dream), or they believe that if what they have accomplished was good enough for their parents and grandparents, it is good enough for them, and for us. They always know someone who knows more than we do.

These are not our “friends”; they are the millstones which will drag us away from our dreams and keep us from our success in life. We must continue to dream and keep revising our dreams to ever higher levels. Do you want to build your business by so many clients this year? Why not double that next year? Do you want to start a business from scratch? Why not take it to a profitable level next year?

Dreams are like goals: they should be obtainable, but they should challenge us to revise and raise the level from time to time. We should be able to measure our goals as well as our dreams. We should be able to explain what attaining them will mean for us. We must know the “why” we want to attain them. Then, they will mean more to us, both while we are striving towards them as well as when we reach them.

Please leave me your comments, or email me at Jim@JimTeasley.com, or call me at 360-314-8691. Watch out for skeptics and don’t let them anchor you to your past life. They don’t have your best interests in their hearts because they don’t know what is in yours. Dreams take courage; obtaining them takes a lot of courage, sometimes enough to say no to others whose karma is negative and selfish.

Reach Out

Since last week, many of you contacted me to comment on the posting “Dare To Dream”. People told me stories about their dreams and how they either were realizing them or were working toward that level of accomplishment. Several others commented on how their dreams were realized by helping others on their own journey.

Never, ever, ever stop dreaming. It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you are, or what you dream about, you should dream about what you want to accomplish and how that can provide satisfaction for you, and your family. Our history is filled with people whose dreams have meant so much to individuals and to our society as a whole.

Perhaps you have accomplished your dreams, or those dreams may have changed since you first started your journey toward accomplishing them. Just like business goals, dreams may change as you proceed on the road to attaining them. We should welcome these opportunities to change, refine, and adjust our dreams and our goals. That is how we grow and mature in both our personal and business lives.

There is something else these people can do, and probably have done within their own journey. Take the time to meet with and encourage others on their journeys to their dreams. Encouraging others to dream, and then to work toward those dreams, will bring immense satisfaction to you. In addition, you are sowing seeds of karma that will return great amounts of good to you. Remember karma?

Be a giver, someone who gives to give, not to get. Givers get their fair share and more because they don’t give to get. Karma takes care of their getting back what they give out. Encouraging others to dream, and to work towards their dreams, enables you to attain your own dreams. Your encouragement of others may take various forms. It will not be the same for every one of us or on every day.

You must look at your networking partners, your relationships that you have built, as people who need your encouragement, your partnership in mutual success. You both have a vested interest in each other’s success. Make it happen through encouraging others to reach for their stars, to reach for their dreams. Of course, as their dreams change, your partnership will take a supportive part in those changes themselves.

This past week, I met with several people with whom I am building networking partnerships or relationships. We may pass referrals to each other; we may just encourage each other to dream. We might inform each other about anything that may help us to succeed in business; we might just chat about opportunities to apply what we already know about our business marketing. It does not matter.

Look around you at your business relationships; look at your networking partners. Who do you know who can benefit from the information or knowledge that you have and can share? Information is power and should be shared to the benefit of others. We should not hoard our encouragement and information. We must reach out and share.

Please leave me your comments, or email me at Jim@JimTeasley.com, or call me at 360-314-8691. Continue to dare to dream and then look for others that need you. Reach out and encourage someone today to dream. Work to help your partners reach their dreams and to revise those dreams as needed. Then do it all over again. Maybe they will join your efforts to reach out to even more who need partners.

Dare to Dream

Too many people today have lost the ability or the desire to dream. It does not matter what you dream about: your work, your family, your health, your life in general, or something very specific, you must dare to dream. If you stop dreaming, you will lose the momentum to succeed in whatever you wish to attain.

Perhaps you have a job that you go to each day which is boring or seems to have no point of achievement. Do you dare to dream about another career which will fulfill your desires and needs to gain that achievement or success level that you wish? Do you dare to dream about making your position more rewarding and more fulfilling so you believe that you could be motivated? Why not?

Do you dare to dream about making your health better so that you can enjoy your later years with your family or friends, or just so you will live a full and active life? Maybe you are in a state of health that seems to have a deadline that is sooner rather than later, but does that mean that you cannot dare to dream about enjoying the time remaining.

Want to spend more time with your children instead of working all the time? Want to improve the time that you do spend with your family? Want to make your life better, happier, or even spend time with new people instead of the ones you see every day at work, play, or otherwise? Dare to dream about how you can change your life and achieve your goals. Goals should be those things that you strive for and achieve.

What can you do besides idle day dreaming? You can dream that you can achieve your dreams and then go about doing whatever you need to do to achieve them. Start with research, talking to others who have achieved what you want or similar goals. Read books, go to meetings about your dreams, and confide in others who may support and encourage your dreams. Share your dreams with other people who also dream.

Think that your dreams are silly and not possible to be achieved? Who told you that? Has anyone else dreamed similar dreams and failed? Sure they have. Edison failed over and over until he invented the electric light bulb. But he kept dreaming and working, doing his research and asking for help from others.

Stop surrounding yourself with those people who discourage you and tell you that you cannot achieve your dreams. Maybe they don’t know what they are talking about and don’t want you to bypass their level of failure. Too bad for them if you succeed where they were too afraid to dream and follow through on their dreams. You might leave them in the dust, making new friends who share your dreams and accomplishments.

Those who know me well may have heard my story about my dreams and how I achieved the biggest one of all. If you haven’t, ask me and I will tell you all the details, good and bad, and how I was rescued from the lowest point of my life. If you don’t want to hear it, tell me your dreams, I’ll be glad to discuss what we can do about them.

Please leave me your comments, or email me at Jim@JimTeasley.com, or call me at 360-314-8691. Dare to dream and then dare to achieve those dreams through the help of others who have dreamed similar dreams or who will help you succeed. That is the best part of relationships, helping others to achieve their dreams. Courage to dream and accomplish dreams can be contagious.

Face To Face

Many business people believe that electronic media is the way to market their product or services and never attempt to meet anyone face to face. We have an abundance of electronic means of communication available to us today, but I still believe that face to face contact, or networking, is the best method possible. There is nothing that is more productive or more sincere than meeting face to face.

I utilize many of these electronic communication methods myself to contact, train, research, and even socialize. I also know that very seldom does anything substantial happen until there is a face to face meeting and communication. Most times everything else leads up to that meeting and the finalization that occurs during it.

Connecting on a personal or face to face basis is the foundation of much of the success of the top business leaders of all times. This personal connection is the concrete footing for relationships, and relationships are the basis for successful business. Doing business with someone whom you have never actually met is like forming a relationship online to get married and discovering the love of your life is a speed freak in the desert.

When you network and attempt to form business relationships, you are constructing partnerships for mutual success. The relationships might bring you the immediate customer, one whom you must nurture in this relationship with you. You should develop that customer into a client who will continue to purchase from you, have a vested interest in your continued success, and refer customers to you.

Some relationships that you form may fail to bring you immediate customers, but may bring you partners who believe in your integrity and offerings so much that they will refer others customers to you. The way that you treat these referred customers may, or may not, result in the original partner becoming a customer, but it will assuredly result in more referrals from that same partner, as well as from the referral.

Businesses which fail to make these face to face meetings have lost the personal touch, relying on the “spray and pray” method of marketing for their success. The personal meeting, where you can look into the other person’s eyes, hear the inflections in their voice, and watch their other mannerisms allows you to tailor your marketing discussion as the conversation takes place. This allows you to listen and hear the other party.

Marketing is not only about presenting what you have to offer. It is about being a consultant, listening to what others need and want, and then finding a way for them to obtain their objective. That may be what we have to offer, or it may be someone else who has the solution to their hunt, but we can be the person who helps them get it. We have to listen, and electronic communication does not let us do so.

Do not stop communicating electronically with others. Incorporate face to face contact within your marketing efforts and pepper these face to face meeting with your best listening skills. Then, stop being a sales person and become a marketing consultant, helping them locate what they need or want, or someone else who can help them in their search. You will be rewarded for your approach and your efforts.

Please leave me your comments, or email me at Jim@JimTeasley.com, or call me at 360-314-8691. Network with appreciation for others and meet with others face to face. You will be surprised at how much success that brings to everyone.