“You can’t solve problems with excuses all your life.”
~ Dave Mattson

There are only 6 more Selling Days left in August and 27 remaining in the Quarter!!!

Making excuses for failures protects our egos boy do I know that one better than most. We have all done it and it seems to help, temporarily. But, making excuses has proved costly in the long run because excuses keep us from facing the truth about ourselves. They keep us from going to work and correcting our mistakes, eliminating our weaknesses, developing our talents, and improving our character.

How have you reacted to past failures? Did you rebel, blame others and circumstances beyond your control, avoid facing uncomfortable circumstances, and live in fear that something worse might happen? Did you chalk them up to bad luck? Did you develop resentments? Did you come to believe that you could never overcome difficult obstacles? Oh yea to all of these.

If this is how you reacted like Wayne has, you have permitted less than successful happenings to affect your life destructively, not only at the time they occurred, but you have given them the power to upset you up to this present moment! What you have not overcome in the past remains to plague you in the present. If you are going to point the finger of blame, point it at the person looking back at you in the mirror. Face your failures, analyze them, and develop a way to achieve better outcomes. Problems, once solved, are gone. Excuses, however, will follow you forever and forever.

Go out and have a Great Selling Day and make a difference in at least one person’s life today.

“You must take action today.”
~ Dr. Denis Waitle

There are only 19 more Selling Days in August and 40 remaining in the Quarter!!!

Get Up and Get Going. Don’t wait for that miracle or that break or “the right time.” Today is your day. This is your time. Choose how you will spend it, and do the same with every other day of the rest of your life. You are in charge of causing your results. Don’t put it off. Don’t put success on lay-away. Don’t sit staring at that TV screen letting your mind go blank while you repeat the procrastinator’s motto: ‘I think I can, I think I could; I think I may, I think I should; I think I might, I think I will; I think I better think more still.’ Stop rationalizing, get out of your chair, stop stewing and start doing!

For starters, ask yourself some hard questions:

• Are you dissatisfied with the status quo?
• What do you have to change in order to move toward where you want to be?
• Which fears do you need to conquer? Do you fear change? Do you fear failure? Do you fear success?

Forget the advice of all those experts, associates, friends, and relatives (I guess I mean me also) who tell you,  you can’t possibly have what you want. Remember, producer Irving Thalberg strongly advised Louis B. Mayer against buying the rights to ‘Gone With the Wind’ because no Civil War picture had ever made a nickel. ‘Gone With the Wind’ is heralded as one of the best and most popular motion pictures ever made – well then almost every movie produced in 1939 was great and so can you be and today I am going to follow my own advice for a change.

Go out and have a Great Selling Day and make a difference in at least one person’s life today.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” ~ Charles Darwin

There are 22 Selling Days in August and 43 remaining in the Quarter!!!

The pace of change on the web has always been fast. Even frenetic. In fact change is one of the few constants these days in marketing, media and PR. If things didn’t change that would actually be more shocking than if they continue to.

When I talk to communications and media professionals lately, there are really just two reactions to this: excitement, which leads to inspiration or fear, which leads to a head in the sand approach. Because no one is ambivalent to change.

So if you’re in any facet of communications (on the media or marketing side) you have either already come to love the evolving, improvisational nature of how we connect or you haven’t. And if you haven’t it is past time you did, because if not you are going to be forever fighting the future. But how to embrace change, stay at the edge and enjoy doing it?

1. Fear nothing: test, tinker and try new platforms, networks and tools
2. Plan for change: develop a digital strategy that is platform agnostic
3. Don’t be static: foster a culture of experimentation and iteration
4. Get data-driven: don’t guess, use analytics to really understand – thank you Steve

If you’re not the one pushing and trying to make things better, then you’re likely just trying to keep pace with those who are. It’s actually a lot easier if you make the decision to create a culture which thrives on experiments and iteration. Now you’re the one pushing what’s next instead of always playing catch-up. If you are within a culture that can’t just do this, it’s even okay to create a structure behind how experimentation should be done so it’s tried in the first place. Then you can remove the boundaries when people get comfortable.

Are the current waves of change on the web affecting your business? To what extent? Do you even know? Everyone on your marketing team should at this point using some data to make decisions. Further, by keeping your finger on the pulse of your marketing analytics you can clearly see how valuable, conversion-oriented traffic sources are performing. Now you know what to adjust and why and can make confident choices about where to shift focus.

I know what some of you are thinking: yeah, we get it: embrace change. But is it really so obvious to everyone?

It still appears to me that the default for most is to cling to the days of old. It’s part of the lizard brain Seth Godin loves to describe. So while the intrepid of you are out there embracing a world in flux, most are not. I fought the entire Twitter – Facebook -Blogging thing long enough hoping that it would fizzle out – but there is some value even though I scoffed at the entire concept because I did not want embrace change.

But what could anyone possibly gain at this point through fear? I think it is a always a better mindset to embrace what’s new and view it as  infinitely compelling rather than to fear it. Why would anyone logically not take this approach?

Go out and have a Great Selling Day and make a difference in at least one person’s life today.