What are the best ways to ensure that you reach your goals? For example, do you write everything down on a piece of paper? Do you throw it all out to the universe and hope for the best? Do you envision yourself reaching your goals? Do you try to do your best?

If you are relying on any of the above four strategies for reaching your goals, chances are that you are not succeeding and falling short in your attempts.

Heidi Grant Halvorson is the author of Succeed, a new book that talks about goal research and how people successfully reach their goals.

According to her work, people reach their goals best when the goals are very specifically detailed. You’ve heard of SMART goals that are specific, measureable, attainable, realistic and time-bound (or some variation thereof – there are several different permutations of what SMART actually stands for). Well it turns out that there is research to substantiate that – people who write down specific goals are more likely to attain them – especially if they detail out the little steps that are required along the way. Breaking one big goal down into several tiny goals, each of which is a SMART goal, will greatly enhance your chances of success.

Furthermore, just hoping for the best doesn’t work – and believing that the goal will be easy to attain doesn’t work either. In Halvorson’s research, participants who believed that they could reach the goal and it would be difficult to reach were more successful than participants who also believed they could reach their goal, but it would be easy to do. Why? Because people in that first group were prepared for adversity and steeled themselves to be resilient and tenacious. People who believed that the path would be smooth were thrown off when things didn’t go as planned. And really – when do things ever go as planned?

So when you have a big goal – or a little goal – that’s important to you, and you are committed to it, here are a few tips to help you with your goal achievement:

• Write down your goal and all the steps you need to take along the way
• Ensure that each goal and sub-goal is specific, measureable and set times when you will work towards that goal and a final date that you hope to achieve it
• Be prepared for a rocky road
• Enlist others for their help and support

And, of course, celebrate and reward yourself when you reach success! After all, you’ll have earned it!

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Lisa Sansom is the Founder of LVS Consulting. A certified coach and positive psychology practitioner, Lisa helps businesses, teams and individuals be at their best. For more information, please visit LVS Consulting or email Lisa directly at lisa.sansom@gmail.com.

Last post, I shared with you the elements of optimistic thinking, also known as explanatory style. According to the research done by Dr. Martin Seligman, optimists not only live longer and have better relationships, but optimistic explanatory style can correlate with professional success. Here’s a look at how this works.

In the 80s, Martin Seligman was called in to consult with Metropolitan Life, an insurance sales company that wanted to improve its retention of out-going cold call sales agents. When I presented this case recently to a group of new MBA students, I asked if anyone had ever had a job like this. Two students raised their hands. I asked them, “How was it?” They both answered, “It sucked.” The rejection rate for out-going cold call sales is high – if you are lucky, you might get a 10% conversion rate, and you never know when that 1 in 10 success will happen. You might hit a dry spell of 30 or 40 or more calls before finding gold.

That sucky work and high failure rate led to a high turnover rate as well. 50% of new hires quit in the first year. Met Life estimated that it was losing $75 million in hiring and training costs annually.

With Seligman’s work in optimism, Metropolitan Life started screening new applicants for optimistic explanatory style. Did it work? The stats speak for themselves.
Of new hires, pessimists were three times more likely than optimists to quit. Why? The top 10% optimists were selling 88% more insurance than the bottom 10% pessimists. Again, why?

There are many possibilities – optimists may have been forming better client relations, optimists may have been staying on the phone longer with potential customers, optimists may have been working longer hours. But what is most likely is that optimists simply made more calls. Each rejection was seen as a temporary setback, and each new phone call was seen as a new opportunity. Optimists’ self-talk was keeping them moving forward to a new call, and their success at sales was fuelling their desire to stay with the company. Pessimists’ self-talk was keeping them mired in the muck and they made fewer calls.

Cold sales is a numbers game – the more calls you make, the more you will sell. Quite often, job seeking is also a numbers game – the more resumes you send out and the more networking you do, the more interviews you will get; the more interviews you get, the more job offers you will get. Same thing with selling your creative services – the more proposals you present, the more gigs you get.

Optimistic thinking skills will help with your resiliency and keep you moving forward to the next action step.

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Lisa Sansom is the Founder of LVS Consulting. A certified coach and positive psychology practitioner, Lisa helps businesses, teams and individuals be at their best. For more information, please visit LVS Consulting or email Lisa directly at lisa.sansom@gmail.com.

Optimists live longer. Optimists have better relationships. Optimists have more promotions at work. Optimists get better job performance evaluations. Optimists get higher pay. Optimists literally see more and are more open to options and opportunities. And optimists have higher sales. All of this has been proven in the psychological research. Sounds great, right? So how can you get some of that action?

There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that about two-thirds of the human population is neurologically programmed to be pessimistic. Being a pessimist has great evolutionary advantages – it allows you to be critical, to foresee problems, to accurately assess crisis situations, all much better than optimists. However, it’s not so great when you are dealing with clients and creative processes. The good news is that you can learn these optimism cognitive skills, and bring them out in appropriate situations.

Here’s how.

According to Dr. Martin Seligman, pessimists explain bad events by saying, in essence, that bad events always happen, that they happen across different domains of life, and that they happen to ‘me’ personally. So let’s say that you wake up and fall out of bed. A pessimist would say something like, “Oh there I go again, being clumsy like always. Guess this is going to be another rotten day…” The pessimist takes the fall personally (“there I go again”) and permanently (“like always”) and sees that one bad event will ripple out pervasively to the rest of the day. An optimist would say something more like, “Whoops! The floor must be extra slippery today.” The optimist sees nothing personal in the bad event, and doesn’t extrapolate it to anything else. It’s just bad luck.

How does this apply to selling your business services? Consider how you talk to yourself when you get a call that some potential client has decided not to buy your services at this time. Do you catastrophize? Do you believe that their rejection says something about you personally? Do you let one bad call ruin your whole day, or even your whole business, believing, as a result of this one call, that you’re not cut out to do it any longer?

Feeling down when bad things happen is natural and part of being human. However, if your pessimistic thinking gets in the way of moving forward, it might be time to try something different: see the situation as isolated, a one-off occasion, and due to bad luck or unfortunate circumstances. You’ll be better off for it in the long run.

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Lisa Sansom is the Founder of LVS Consulting. A certified coach and positive psychology practitioner, Lisa helps businesses, teams and individuals be at their best. For more information, please visit LVS Consulting or email Lisa directly at lisa.sansom@gmail.com.

Networkers are continually making strides to differentiate their business cards. Everything from content (QR codes), to design (odd shapes, cut-outs, folds), to material (plastic, wood, fabric) has been manipulated to make one person’s card stand out from another’s.

But what if you’re someone like me that’s looking for a job? I don’t own a nice printer nor do I want to spend a lot of money on fancy cards. Another option is to order business cards online.

One company is even offering “free” business cards as long as you pay for shipping, which still costs less than ordering cards from a big box retailer. The drawback is you have to choose from a set of design templates.

While some may see limitations, I actually see an opportunity to get creative. Forego the standard designs and choose something with a seemingly irrelevant design and MAKE IT relevant. For example, one design features an air conditioner on the card and is probably intended for someone in air conditioning sales and service.

I’m searching for career opportunities in marketing. So, I made this design relevant to me and my goals by adding the phrase “need marketing help? Contact me! I create cool.” right beside the picture of the air conditioner. See the card at http://bit.ly/ffq8ZO

It can be risky, but in marketing, risk wins. This is the way to stand out and differentiate yourself in a crowded job market. This is the way to be top of mind when that person you networked with looks at the big pile of cards and decides to call you first.

John Paul de Silva is an MBA graduate seeking career opportunities in non-profit marketing while volunteering as a consultant for a Toronto non-profit. When not working on the 4P’s, he can be found at the gym, pool hall, rap record store, foodie place…or one day, a magical place with all those things rolled into one location. Follow him @jp9desilva

Like many freelancers, I think about money… a lot. I worry that I won’t make enough to pay my bills. I wonder how to balance doing work that I really love and am proud of with the necessity of pleasing clients and appealing to new potential clients. I look around at other people and manically suspect that they’ve discovered some magic secret for guaranteed income that I haven’t.

I’m pretty sure it’s not just me. In my business, I work with lots of other freelancers, solopreneurs, and creative professionals and all those pesky questions keep coming up: How do I set my prices? How should I pitch my services? How can I grow more business? We’re all looking for that magic bullet.

The other day, I saw a definition of Karma that started to challenge some of my thinking.

Karma says that skilful actions produce positive results while unskilful actions produce negative consequences. Actions are skilful to the degree that they are free from craving, delusion and resistance.

I started to think about how this might shape my work – and my marketing. How much does craving, delusion, and resistance taint my work and how much is that limiting how financially successful I could be?

Each term, of course, has a fairly specific definition.

Delusion is fundamentally a false belief in the separation of self and other, of dividing the world into me and everyone else – of us and them. How is us/them thinking limiting my options? Thinking about clients like the enemy (you know the clients I’m talking about)? Worrying about competition?

Likewise, craving goes beyond simple greed. Craving is fundamentally about attachment to a particular outcome. This can be a little tricky to grasp. Most of us wouldn’t bother doing anything if we didn’t desire a certain result from the action: I send in the proposal because I hope to get the job. The desire isn’t the problem; grasping attachment to one outcome is the problem: I’ll just die if I don’t get the job.

How is fixating on particular outcomes blinding me to other possibilities? How could my approach open up if I was more flexible about what success might look like in this particular instance?

Resistance is that pesky refusal to accept the world as it currently is. Like craving, it isn’t a problem to want to change the world, but we must start where we are, facing the world as we find it; as it is, not as we would have it be. So, where am I refusing to simply accept what is as it is – at least as a place to start?

I don’t think there are any simple answers to these questions. I don’t think there is a “5 ways to avoid craving, delusion, and resistance in business proposals.” And in the end, we all have to wrestle with prices, marketing, and business development. But I do think that taking a little time with these questions has the potential for interesting insights and the kind of transformation that can take my work and my life to a whole new level.

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Ben Kadel (rhymes with bottle) is a social psychologist who specializes in the emotional dynamics of work and work groups. He has spent the last 15 years or so figuring out what it takes to help people do work that is both personally fulfilling and materially successful. He is on a personal mission to convert all the energy that is currently wasted in fear, doubt, confusion and conflict into productive energy moving people towards goals that really matter. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and is a founding partner of Emotus Operandi. He is an engaging speaker, accomplished writer and snappy dresser – even if he does say so himself.  Website: emotusoperandi.com

At a recent conference, we had the honour of having Warren Bennis speak to us about his life and his insights into leadership. If you aren’t aware of Warren Bennis, then pick up a copy of any of his zillion books on leadership, or his recent memoir, aptly titled Still Surprised. I firmly believe that there are many lessons contained therein for entrepreneurs and creatives.

Bennis spoke to our group for over an hour, and I listened so intently that I didn’t take any notes except for one. At the end, when Bennis was open for some questions, an audience member asked him when he knew that he had finally clicked onto his rightful work path, working towards his life’s meaning.

Bennis put his face in his hands, carefully considering the question. And then he spoke about his mentors – how all along his path, he has had excellent mentors, including the great management guru Douglas Mcgregor (of Theory X and Theory Y fame). How, without these mentors, he doesn’t really know where he would be, and what he would be doing. Bennis concluded with this advice that he also gives his students: Stalk your mentors.

So who are your mentors? Sometimes this is referred to as your very own personal Board of Directors. When you think about who you are, what your business is about, your creative direction – where do you seek inspiration, support and direction? And who else would you want as a mentor? Bennis found mentorship and observed his mentors keenly and astutely, and formed the basis of his own work in leadership as a result. Through his own humility and hard work, seizing opportunities and helping others, he became great. But nothing would have been possible without his mentors.

Stalk your mentors. And, I would add, pay it forward – because someone is looking at you thinking that you should be on their personal Board of Directors. We all have something to share, and ever so much more to learn.

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Lisa Sansom is the Founder of LVS Consulting. A certified coach and positive psychology practitioner, Lisa helps businesses, teams and individuals be at their best. For more information, please visit LVS Consulting or email Lisa directly at lisa.sansom@gmail.com.

Do you have a lucky charm or a totem that you carry around with you? It doesn’t have to be the standard rabbit’s foot – it could be a lucky coin, a special token from a memorable place, a favourite piece of clothing that you wear to client meetings. The variety of these lucky items is enormous, and some people put great faith in them. However, others dismiss them as hocus-pocus and superstition. But if you have a lucky charm, chances are you wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Now, it seems that science is backing you up.

Research done by Lysann Damisch of the University of Cologne, and her colleagues Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler, demonstrated that lucky charms actually do work – because they make the holder more confident and self-efficacious.

For more information on the research study, visit
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100713122846.htm

But the real question is: what does this mean for you?

Even highly successful superstars strike out occasionally and lose games. So will you. However, if you have a lucky charm that works for you, keep it! Polish it, love it, put it in your pocket. Superstitious rituals – like how you lace your shoes before an important meeting – work just as well.

Keep that edge – clients buy from a confident you, and whatever helps you keep that edge is worth having around. Just remember to wash it every once in a while.
Lisa Sansom is the Founder of LVS Consulting. A certified coach and positive psychology practitioner, Lisa helps businesses, teams and individuals be at their best. For more information, please visit LVS Consulting or email Lisa directly at lisa.sansom@gmail.com.