Use A Systematic Process
A major type of communication in the business organization is meetings for problem solving and decision making. The key to effective problem solving and decision making discussions, is for you to all go through the process systematically.

Define the Problem Clearly
Right at the beginning, you ask the question, “What exactly is the problem?” Clarity of definition will resolve 50% of the issues before they go any further.

Focus on the Future
When discussing a problem, be sure to focus on the future over the past. Ask the question, “Where do we go from here?” “What do we do from here?” “What are our options for the future?” Too many problem-solving discussions end up focusing all of the attention of all the people present on what happened in the past and who is to blame. The effective executive uses this type of communication to focus on where the company and the individuals are going, and what can happen in the future – the only part of the equation over which anyone has any control.

Talk About the Solutions
A second element in effective problem solving communications, is for you to talk about the solutions instead of talking about the problems. It is for you to keep the attention of the individuals in the meeting focused on the possible solutions and what can be done rather than what has already happened.

Release Creativity
The discussion of solutions is inherently positive, uplifting and has a tendency to release creativity amongst the group. A discussion of problems is inherently negative, demotivating and tends to inhibit creativity.

The Key to Positive Thinking
You can become a positive thinker simply by becoming a solution-oriented person rather than a problem-oriented person. If you get everyone in your organization thinking and talking in terms of solutions, you will be astonished at the quality and quantity of ideas that will emerge.

Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can immediately to become a better problem solver and decision maker.

First, take some time to be absolutely clear about the problem that is under discussion. Give some thought to what an ideal decision or solution would accomplish. Instead of focusing on the situation as it is, talk about the situation as you would like it to be.

Second, keep the conversation focused on solutions, on what can be done in the future. The more you think and talk about solutions, the more positive and creative everyone will be and the better ideas you will come up with.

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Wealth creation occurs when you produce a product or service that people want and need and are willing to pay for at a price that is in excess of your total cost of producing that product or service.  The key to business success has always been the same, find a need and fill it.  We all earn our livings by serving other people in some way.  Your business goal is to find out what people really want and need, and then give it to them better and faster than anyone else.

Secrets of Market Leadership
Hundreds of companies have been studied to discover the secrets of market leadership.  There are three secrets. The first one is Operational Excellence — the company has developed the ability to produce its products and services at a cost substantially lower than its competitors.  The second is Customer Intimacy — the company develops a close relationship with its customers based on excellent knowledge of the customer’s business. Thirdly, there is Technological Superiority — the company offers a product or service that is superior to that of its competitor.

Additional Value
There are several strategies that you can follow to create additional value for your customers and additional wealth for yourself.  Improve your product or service in some way so that it is better than that of your competitors, at the same or at a lower price.  Produce or deliver your product or service faster than your competitors.  Produce your product or service cheaper than your competitors, maintaining or increasing your level of quality.  Offer better follow-up and support services to go along with your product or service than your competitors.  Make your product easier to acquire and more readily available than your competitors.  Make your prices and terms more attractive and convenient than your competitors.  Include additional products and services with your offerings, at the same price.

Reputation
Your reputation in the marketplace determines how much you can sell, and the prices you charge.  The friendliness of your staff and the ease of doing business with you is a key part of your reputation.  Your credibility with your customers, the degree to which they see you as trustworthy and dependable is a key value to your customers.  Selling to an individual customer requires an impeccable reputation and a focus on the improvement your product or service makes in their lives.  What does your product achieve for your customer?  What does your product help your customer to avoid?  What does your product help your customer to preserve?  How does your product help your customer to get better results in his life?

Action Exercise
List three ways that you could improve the relationships that you have with your customers.

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In a free market economy like the United States, the customer is the king or queen, and they rule supreme. Business and entrepreneurship are devoted to serving customers, to improving the lives and work of ordinary people. This is what makes the American dream possible.

The Spark plug of American Prosperity
The entrepreneur is the spark plug in the engine of the free market and the business system. It is the entrepreneur who recognizes and anticipates a customer need, then assembles the resources necessary to satisfy that need at a price that yields a profit. It is this ability that creates all wealth and opportunity.

Entrepreneurship is Risky
Entrepreneurs are those who take risks to produce goods and services for customers, gambling that the customers will be there to pay prices high enough to yield profits. These profits are essential for the entrepreneur to repeat the process of developing and producing even more products and services in the future.

The Companies of Tomorrow
Some of the biggest and most profitable companies in America today, such as Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, and Apple, did not exist twenty-five years ago. Each year, new companies emerge and older companies disappear. The process of “creative destruction” in the marketplace never ends. Customers’ wants and needs are changing continually, like the weather, from one day to the next, they never remain very long.

The Dynamics of the Free Market
The free market is the vast national and international meeting place where buyers and sellers come together to negotiate and decide what to sell, what to buy, at what prices, and under what terms. The “bright side” of the free market is when businesses strive to please customers in the short term while simultaneously thinking about planning for the long term. The best businesses are those dedicated to building and maintaining customer loyalty so that once they sell something to a customer, the customer is so happy and satisfied that he or she buys again.

Competition Brings Out the Best
To succeed in a competitive market, many of the very best qualities of the individual are demanded. At a minimum, a successful entrepreneur requires courage, both to begin in the first place and persist against endless problems and disappointments. An entrepreneur must be optimistic, energetic, visionary, determined, intelligent, flexible, and able to bounce back repeatedly from disappointment and temporary failure. An entrepreneur, above all, requires an instinct for identifying what products or services he or she can produce and offer that extremely demanding customers will buy and pay for.

Action Exercise
What the U.S. needs today is a new birth of liberty expressed in a national commitment to promote entrepreneurial activity by removing the hindrances that hold it back. What is your entrepreneurial dream? What steps can you take to make your dream a reality?

Brian Tracy

The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. This insight comes from the pioneering work on upward financial mobility in America conducted by Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s. After studying many of the factors that were thought to contribute to individual financial success over the course of a person’s lifetime, he concluded that there was one primary factor that took precedence over all the others. He called it “time perspective.”

Plant Trees

What Banfield found was that the higher a person rises in any society, the longer the time perspective or time horizon of that person. People at the highest social and economic levels make decisions and sacrifices that may not pay off for many years, sometimes not even in their own lifetimes. They “plant trees under which they will never sit.”

Doctors

An obvious example of someone with a long time perspective is the man or women who spends ten or twelve years studying and interning to become a doctor. This person takes extraordinarily long time to lay down the foundation for a lifetime career. And partially because we know how long it takes to become a doctor, we hold doctors in the highest esteem of any professional group. We appreciate and admire the sacrifices that they have made in order to be able to practice a profession that is so important to so many of us. We recognize their long time perspectives.

Long Time Perspectives

People with long term perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long, long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years from now.

Short Time Perspectives

People at the lowest levels of society have the shortest time perspectives. They focus primarily on immediate gratification and often engage in behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to lead to negative consequences in the long term. At the very bottom of the social ladder, you find hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. These people think in terms of the next drink or the next fix. Their time perspective is often less than one hour.

Delayed Gratification is the Key to Financial Success

Your ability to practice self-mastery, self-control, and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long time perspective. This attitude is essential to financial achievement of any kind.

Action Exercise

Practice a long term perspective in every area of your life, especially in your financial life but also with your family and your health. Think of where you would ideally like to be in five years and begin today to take steps in that direction.

Brian Tracy

Preparation is the mark of a professional. Preparation is also the mark of a successful person in any field. As you move upward in any occupation, you will find that the top people spend far more time in preparation than the average person does. The top 10 percent in any field are always more thoroughly prepared in every detail than those who struggle for a living in the same occupation.

Guard Against the Worst

For me, as a professional speaker and seminar leader, the worst thing that could happen would be for my luggage to be lost and for me to arrive without the clothes and seminar materials that I need for my speaking engagement. To guard against this situation, I carry all my essentials on board with me, never out of my sight. Because of this habit of advance planning, I have never had an insurmountable problem because of baggage delays or losses. On the way to your destination, in the achievement of your most important goal, continually ask yourself, What are the worst possible things that can happen? And then guard against them.

Plan for Any Eventuality

The mark of a superior thinker is that he or she assumes that the worst will happen and makes provisions against it. Napoleon Bonaparte was once asked if he believed in luck. He replied, “Yes, I do. I believe in bad luck. I believe I will always have it, and I plan accordingly.”
Refuse to be Passive

My traveling experiences have taught me two things. First, prepare for the worst. No matter what anyone tells you, be prepared for the possibility that he or she will not follow through. Second, be proactive, not passive. Instead of becoming angry or depressed, get busy and get going. Find an alternative. Refuse to accept the current situation if it is not satisfactory. Instead of waiting for things to happen, make things happen.

Prepare a Checklist

Pilots carefully review a checklist prior to every flight. Even if they have flown thousands of hours and have been active pilots for twenty years, they still go through the checklist every single time. You should prepare a checklist as well. No matter how many times you have made the same trip, you should review your checklist once more. Never trust to memory. The failure to check just one critical detail can leave you stranded and maybe even put your destination out of reach. As you proceed toward your personal destinations and struggle toward your goals, the consequences of not following your checklist will not be as severe. But it is not unusual for a business to go broke or a person to lose all his or her money because someone failed to pay attention to a critical detail.

Action Exercise

Get in the habit of making checklists for big and small tasks. Make checklists for travelling and for work related tasks.

Brian Tracy

Awaken the New Perception that is Pressure-Free

Attitude is Everything
The most important attitude for financial success is long-term thinking. Successful people think a long way into the future and they adjust their daily behaviors to assure they achieve their long-term goals.  In a longitudinal study done at Harvard University in the 50s and 60s, they studied the reasons for upward socio-economic mobility.  They were looking for factors that would predict whether or not an individual or family was going to move upward and be wealthier in the future than in the present.

They studied factors like education, intelligence, being born into the right family, or having the right connections.  In every case, they found individuals who had been born with every blessing in life who did poorly. They also found individuals who had been born or come to this country with no advantages at all who had been extremely successful.  What was the distinguishing factor?

They finally determined that there was only one key attitude that mattered. They called it “Time Perspective.”  Time perspective refers to the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.

Time Perspective
People with long-time perspective invariably move up economically in the course of their lifetimes.  When you spend weeks, months and years developing your skills and ability and expanding your experience in order to be successful, you have long-time perspective.  The average professional person has a time perspective of 10, 15 and 20 years.

Begin to see that everything that you are doing today is part of a long-time continuum, at the end of which you are going to be financially independent or financially unfortunate.  People with short-time perspective think only about fun and pleasure in the short term.  They have what economists call “The inability to delay gratification.”  They have an irresistible tendency to spend every single penny they earn and everything that they can borrow.

When you develop long-time perspective, you develop the discipline to delay gratification and to save your money rather than spending it.  The combination of long-time perspective and delayed gratification puts you onto the high road to financial independence.

Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do to develop the attitudes of financially successful people:

First, think long-term about your financial life.  Decide exactly how much you want to be worth five years, ten years and twenty years from today. Write it down. Make a plan. Take action on your plan every single day.

Second, develop the ability to delay gratification.  Instead of buying something on impulse, put off buying decisions for a day, a week or even a month. Decide in advance to “think it over” before you buy anything.  This can change the way you spend money almost immediately.

 Brian Tracy

The way you think about money will determine how much of it you accumulate more than any other factor.  Your attitude toward money affects your emotions and your motivations.

Do You Feel That You Have Enough?
In psychology, money is what is called a “deficiency need.”  This means that it only motivates you when you feel deficient in it, when you don’t feel that you have enough.  Above a certain level, when you feel that you have enough, it is no longer a motivator.  Put another way, when you have enough money, you don’t think about it very much.  But when you have too little, you think about it all the time.

Determine Your Attitude Toward Money
The effect money has on your emotional life depends on your attitude toward it.  If you feel that you have too little, money can become an obsession for you.  It can dominate your thinking, feelings and actions. Arguments over money are a major reason for marital breakdown. Problems with money are the primary reason for business failure, the ruination of friendships and psychosomatic illnesses of all kinds.  It’s not uncommon for people to even kill themselves over money problems.

Practice the Reality Principle
The Reality Principle applies especially to matters of money.  This principle states that, “You must deal with life as it is, not as you wish it were, or could be.”  Most people live in a world of partial self-delusion, with regard to money.  They wish, hope, and pray about their financial futures while at the same time, deep in their hearts, they know their dre ams will never mat erialize.  In Lewis Carroll’s book, Alice in Wonderland, one of the characters says quite happily that he is quite capable of believing several impossible things before breakfast each day.  In the same way, many people believe quite impossible things about money and then they wonder why they are having so many financial problems.

Overcome Deep Seated Beliefs
One of the most common obstacles to achieving financial independence is a deep-seated belief that somehow money is wrong and that people who have a lot of it are inherently evil.  This belief is not based on any factual foundation.  It goes back to early childhood conditioning when the growing child is often told this because of other people’s desire to rationalize away their own financial failures.

Money Is Good
The fact is that money is good.  It takes money to buy homes, cars, clothes, food and most of the good things in life.  Money has an energy of its own and it is largely attracted to people who treat it well.  Money tends to flow toward those people who can use it in the most productive ways to produce valuable goods and services, and who can invest it to create employment and opportunities that benefit others.  At the same time, money flows away from those who use it poorly, or who spend it in non-productive ways.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to improve your attitude toward money:

First, be perfectly honest to yourself with regard to money and to the amount you want to acquire in life.  Pretending that you don’t care about money when you really do will only make you unhappy.

Second, begin today to think about all the wonderful things that you could have in your life if you had more money.  Then, begin to think of all the things that you could do to increase the amount you earn and the amount you keep.

Brian Tracy

Never Worry About Money Again
You must aim to reach the point where you have enough money so that you never have to worry about money again. The good news is that financial independence is easier to achieve today than it has ever been before. We live in the richest country at the richest time in all of human history. We are surrounded by more wealth and affluence than ever before. Your job is to get your fair share.

Financial Success Is Not An Accident
The Law of Cause and Effect applies to money as much as to any other subject. This law says that financial success is an effect. As such, it proceeds from certain, specific causes. When you identify these causes and implement them in your own life and activities, you will get the same effects that hundreds of thousands, and even millions of others have gotten. You can achieve whatever level of affluence you really want if you will just do what others have done before you to achieve the same results. And if you don’t, you won’t. It is as simple as that.

Your Beliefs Determine Your Success
There is perhaps no other area where universal laws are more in evidence than in the acquiring and keeping of money. In America today, there are several million men and women who have started with nothing, or deeply in debt, and achieved financial independence. Their attitudes and behaviors have been studied in great depth. We now know the keys to wealth creation better than ever before. And what we know is that your most cherished beliefs on the subject of money will be the primary determinants of how much you acquire and how much you keep over the course of your working lifetime.
Your Primary Aim in Life
Your primary aim in life should be the achievement of your own happiness. However, happiness is something that exists naturally in the absence of fears, doubts and negative emotions. One of the factors that most deprives you of happiness is worry about money. And, by the way, when we talk about money worries, we’re not referring to your having too much. The problem is virtually always that people feel that they have too little money and their lives are suffering as a result.

Build a Financial Fortress
Perhaps the greatest single fear, the one that causes you more distress and unhappiness than anything else, is the fear of failure. In the area of money, you experience this as the fear of poverty and the fear of loss. Since one of the deepest needs of human nature is security, any threat to your security, real or imaginary, can cause you tremendous stress.

You can only free yourself from the fears of poverty and failure by achieving a specific level of financial worth and then by building a fortress around it so that you are safe and impregnable. This achievement of financial independence is a key responsibility of adult life. No one else will do it for you.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to implement the Law of Cause and Effect in your financial life:

First, begin today to implement the causes of financial success in our society. This requires that you spend less, save more, invest carefully and strive toward financial independence.

Second, study other people who are financially successful who have started from little or nothing. Find out what they did to become financially independent and discipline yourself to do the same things.

Brian Tracy

Everyone I talk to wants to be wealthy.  Most are savvy, hardworking and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their financial goals.

What’s the one thing that holds most smart people back?

What’s the one thing that limits the earning potential?

It’s not starting a business.  And it’s not delivering your product or service. The one thing that keeps most people from being successful and wealthy is knowing how to close the sale.

No sale, no income, no business.

Closing The Sale Is The Key to Success!

No matter how smart you are, how good your product or service is, or how long you’ve been in business—if you can’t close the sale, you won’t ever achieve the level of wealth and success you deserve.

Whether you’re just getting started or you’re a seasoned business owner, I’m sure you’ve felt the frustration of losing a sale you deserved, and increasing your income.  And during this current recession, with sales shrinking or at best stagnating for most businesses, there is only one sure way to keep profits rolling in.

When I first started out in business, I know that I lost a lot of sales I deserved due to a whole host of common objections.  Simply because I didn’t know how to close the sale, all too many of my customers would walk away without getting the product or service they needed and I’d lose the profit I could have earned.

Even worse, I’d lose the potential profits I could have earned from getting the customer on board and helping them for years to come.

Imagine you’ve cooked a delicious meal, but then you couldn’t get anyone to eat it. That would never happen in my house, but that is what happens to all to many business owners. They have a great product or service and they can’t get enough people to use it and buy it.

There is one simple truth about selling and without it you could struggle forever to be successful.  The simple truth about selling is that your prospects, your potential customers, are better at convincing themselves to buy than you are.  Once you understand this simple strategy and start using it, you’ll close many more sales and start achieving your financial success. This is the one approach that changed my life and can change yours too.  With it you can close more sales in less time!

Making Selling Easy!

Why is it so easy to make more money when your prospects do the selling? Trying to convince anyone to spend money is a challenge.  Helping them get what they want is easy.  And that’s the simple idea behind Eliminating Obstacles to Sales.  It shows you how to walk your prospect to the close so they get the product or service they want and you make more.

Eliminate Obstacles to Maximize Your Wealth!

If you drive to work every morning, I don’t have to remind you that it takes much longer to get to work in rush hour traffic.  Even a well-designed and well-built freeway slows down to a mind-numbing crawl when it’s overloaded with cars.  Nothing is more aggravating.  You’ve got a well-tuned driving machine that could easily do 60 miles an hour and get you to work in 15 or 30 minutes. Instead, you can spend an hour or more stuck in traffic.   Your prospects’ objections are like the cars in that traffic jam, slowing down the sales process.  Eliminate those objections in advance, and you and your prospect get to the sale in half the time.

Move the obstacles off the road and clear the way for your prospects to buy.  You’ll melt their resistance and sell more of your products and services—again and again.  Use this technique to eliminate obstacles to the sale and ‘pre-sell’ your prospects. You’ll close more sales and make more money with less effort.

To your success,

Brian Tracy