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"Kathy is a natural. She's such a giving and entertaining speaker. She gives the sizzle along with the steak."
- Jeff Crilley, Emmy Award Winning TV journalist
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Do you take time to plan your goals and how you will achieve them? Do you write down your goals each year?
Taking time to plan and focus on what you want to accomplish and how you want your business or your career to grow dramatically increases your chance of reaching your goals. Brian Tracy says that every minute you spend planning saves you 10-20 minutes later.
Not only are goals important, but also taking time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished in the current year and deciding what you need to stop doing gives you focus, power and energy.
My commitment to you is to provide programs to enhance your brand and your leadership skills. One strategy to keep focused is to take time to plan goals and strategies for the upcoming year. This October, I will be leading my fifth leadership and planning retreat for women.
If getting away from the hectic pace of your life, focusing on what you want and spending a weekend with a powerful group of women leaders is appealing to you, I invite you to visit my Annual Leadership Retreat Blog to see how you will benefit by attending.
You can view two video testimonials from women who attended the Annual Leadership Retreat in October 2007 who are coming back this year:
For more details, read the May 2 post on my Annual Leadership Retreat Blog. You can also visit my website or call me at 972.529.6744.
Give yourself the gift of time to plan, think, reflect on what you want to accomplish in 2009.
Are you watching the Olympics? Superstars like medal winners Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt make the Olympics exciting to watch. They appear to be super-human in their talents. Watching Phelps and Bolt compete in a field is amazing. Their extraordinary talent spurs everyone else in the race to push harder and turn in their top performance.
It’s the same with your team. Do you have employees that excel? Those that perform above the rest set the standard and encourage everyone else to work harder and ideally improve team results.
Women have great ideas and intuition about people, places and things. However, we sometimes let it stop at the idea instead of implementing something that could radically change our businesses, our families and our lives. Big ideas often seem like dreams, however, big ideas and dreams come true because someone decided to take some kind of action toward a dream.
Recently, I posted the response below on LinkedIn to a question on what people do to reach their dreams and received positive response from it so thought I would share it with you.
The success I’ve found in reaching my dreams and what I teach others in my teleseminars and workshops is a very simple formula:
1. be very clear about what you want
2. write it down
3. believe it is possible and visualize it
4. take action (any action) to get started
5. if you lose focus, remind yourself of what you want and do steps 2 – 4 again.
Some key concepts to keep in mind about your big ideas:
- The most important things to do is take some form of action right away because dreams lose their power if you don’t get started when you have the inspiration.
- If other people drag you down, it’s because they are thinking of their dreams and don’t understand yours.
- To me, it’s a good idea to always have dreams to work toward. Once we stop dreaming, we stop growing, stop innovating, stop being curious about the world around us.
I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes about dreaming big:
"All men dream, but not all equally. Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake to find it was all vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous, for they may act their dreams with open arms and make things happen." – T. E. Lawrence (a.k.a. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’)
Dream Big!
Visit my web site at www.kathygarland.com
Happy is in. Have you noticed all the focus on happiness?
A search on Amazon lists over 700 products with Happiness in the title, including Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness.
Gretchen Rubin is writing a book and has a blog dedicated to Happiness.
A former colleague of mine, Dave Norton, lectures and leads workshops on Creating Happiness by Design on creating experiences to produce customer happiness.
It makes me happy that happy is in! When we are happy, we are better leaders, better problem-solvers and are able to provide better customer service and a better experience for our customers.
What can you do to create happiness for yourself and others?
The first thing to do as a leader is to remind yourself of what makes you happy. When women are happy, everyone else follows suit. You set the tone.
Below are some more things that make me happy.
Being in nature. This is Butchart Gardens in Canada.
Spending time with family (my husband, kids, daughter’s fiancee and his brother)
Working with a group of clients at my weekend retreat (www.kathygarland.blogspot.com)
What makes you happy? I’d love to hear from you – you can post a comment on my blog at www.kathygarland.com/blog or writing me at garlandkj@gmail.com.
It’s time to be happy!
This is one of my favorite quotes from a designer I worked with in Minneapolis. Occasionally we would need to tell a client that a project would cost more than the original estimate due to their changes or that we needed more time, or something they wanted was not available. There is a fine art to telling people no or communicating bad news.
Everyone has to deliver bad news from time to time or say no. I always respect people who will notify me without delay when there is something I need to know.
If you need to tell someone no or deliver bad news, remember these keys:
- Tell the person as soon as possible. If you are reluctant to tell her or him, it will get worse over time.
- Be respectful. State your reasons why and be truthful.
- Keep emotions out of it as much as possible. Use facts to support your decision.
- Talk directly to the person who is your primary contact.
- Carefully choose your communication method. In person or phone is preferable. To me, email is not a respectful way to decline if the person who is being notified has a lot at stake or has invested time with you, such as a big proposal or a job interviews. To resign from a volunteer commitment for example, should be communicated by phone or in person. Saying no to a lunch invitation is certainly fine to communicate through email.
The most important thing about saying no is that once you make a decision, you communicate that as soon as possible to the person who needs to know.
The Steak & Ale Restaurant chain is being added to the heap of failed brands, tired and worn by years of sameness. The parent company announced the closing of the chain this week.
When my husband and I got married, we went to Steak & Ale on our honeymoon. Great steak, great salad bar, great atmosphere. Fast forward thirty years when we took my in-laws to dinner to guess where? Steak & Ale. Same steak, same salad bar, same atmosphere.
Steak & Ale did not update their restaurants or their image. While consistency is important with a brand, over time it can become dull and not relevant to consumers. The pub atmosphere of the 70′s and 80′s was popular for Steak & Ale, so much so that they didn’t change it at all. Consumers’ tastes change and they moved on from this trend. The company blamed the economy, however, the economy is a catalyst to kick out marginal businesses that are not relevant to their customers’ needs.
Keep your business image fresh and updated and your products and services relevant to the needs of your customers. If Steak & Ale had paid attention to this concept, they might still be in business.