I asked, “When you spoke to your employee about what you discovered, did they learn from it or did they just feel guilty?” “He probably just felt guilty”, admitted my client.

Every mistake and misstep by an employee is an opportunity to invest in their growth. If you only express disappointment in bad behavior, you will actually cause more hesitation and dependency on your guidance – not less. Employees fundamentally want to please you, and if their best judgment at the time only makes you mad they will quickly learn not to trust themselves and instead, wait for your direction rather than thinking on their own.

Count to 10 and think about your reaction before commenting on mistakes. Responding properly can build a better employee and head of your own future disappointment.

I celebrated with him but then said, “Now add a zero to your previous goal and let’s keep charging!” His reaction was, “Oops, you caught me thinking small again!” Though he celebrated his new threshold, which had been a goal for some time, his next level of achievement was apparently shooting too low in the context of what I predicted and believed for him.

Consider the last goal you set and attained. Did you immediately set another goal – and did the new goal make your palms a little sweaty? If so, then you are on a terrific achievement path – if not, you may need to consider believing in more in your potential!

Who are you serving in your business? Take a minute and reflect on the cross section of the customers and clients that exchange their money for your value. Do you like them? I know this is a funny question, but really, do you like doing business with the people that you do business with? If you can’t answer a solid and quick yes to that question then it’s because you are not clear who YOU are in business. You have unconsciously, like many of us, allowed yourself to serve whoever comes in the door. And whoever comes in the door does not necessarily align with what you know deep down is why you got into business in the first place. It’s likely that you’ve not yet made, or made recently, what I call an Authenticity Calibration in your business.

To authenticate your business you must first decide who and how you want to be represented in the
marketplace. You do this by asking some pretty introspective questions of yourself. Consider these:

• Why am I in business in the first place? Is it for money, or for a bigger purpose?
• When I conceptualized my business, who did I imagine serving and in what way and for how long?
• What is my ideal role in the business? Am I more suited in sales or product development or administration or service delivery? And if I’m more suited in one of those areas am I trying to hard to be the master CEO that runs all these things as though I’m an expert in each.
• How long do I intend to do this and how am I going to get out of it when I want to?
• Is there more in life I intend to live then what I’m living now as a business owner or leader?
• Is my personality being reflected through my business as I intend?
• Do my employees and my business image properly represent me – my values and my principles in the marketplace?

So just keep going with these types of questions. Introspectively, honestly and in a penetrating way examine whether your principles, your integrity, desire, passion, values, intention, ethic – these things are truly connecting and reflect with what you do in your business, who your business serves and who you hire and what personality your business projects as a result.

The bottom line rests in the following challenge: Make an impeccable connection between what you value and how your business expresses that. This can’t be contrived and it can’t be faked. These things reflect YOU.

Now, are you comfortable with that? Does that connection seem right? Is it accurate? When you can answer “yes” to this description of alignment you have adequately connected who you are, with who you serve, and you have become more authentic in serving your marketplace.

When you make this calibration you’ll find a fresh, new energy for getting things done. Suddenly you find ways to attract the customers that you enjoy serving and sending those you don’t to other solutions. You find, build and keep employees and partners that compliment you and reflect your values. Your image in the marketplace becomes less cloudy and more understandable. Marketing messages resonate, sales efforts produce more results and with more profitable clients, people are buying and buying without challenge to your price.

Challenge yourself to examine honestly whether you are authentic in your business and whether your business authentically represents you and your persona. Be authentic.

How about you? Do you sometimes have trouble finishing what you start?

Coach Dailey has a solution…listen up!

My favorite fundamental for achieving business success is “Finish Relentlessly”. Why is it my favorite? Because it is the simplest way to assure dominant gain over most any business adversary. It’s not that I’m hyper-competitive or anything. Let’s face it, business success is about getting a customer before someone else and keeping them longer than someone else. By default we are in a competitive position. And the most competitive business wins.

So here’s what I know: most people are poor finishers and if you can simply learn how to finish what you start, you will become world class in virtually anything you apply effort.

To master finishing relentlessly, you must first recognize that starting is not finishing. Now I know this seems incredibly fundamental but hear me out. I can tell you that the most talented business people and entrepreneurs I know are phenomenal starters – and most struggle with finishing…that is until they figure out a way to keep the things they start in front of their face until their done and discipline themselves not to start more than they can finish in the first place.

How to do you get really good at finishing? Here’s four tips:

1. When you set a goal – also define a vivid picture of what it looks like when you are done: how it feels, what will change in your life or the life of others, what sort of rewards it will bring – the whole Technicolor picture.
2. Next, resist the temptation to start new things just for the sake of adrenaline. If you are looking for a thrill, look for it at the finish line and realize that only being excited about starting is like getting excited about walking into your favorite restaurant and ordering but never eating. The real deal is in following through.
3. Third, only count what is real. If you count what you expect or count what you predict or count what you hope for…you are counting the proverbial sheep. Fictitious counting is detrimental to your character and your completion. Only count what’s done.
4. And finally – set a gratifying reward to indulge in after you have achieved your current goal. Don’t be duped into thinking that when you achieve the goal that will be reward enough. It won’t. Unless you have something beyond the goal that you can look forward to that you will do for yourself or give yourself permission to indulge in – you’ll find that the goal will remain illusive indefinitely.

Put those things in place and you’ll learn to finish relentlessly and become a world class goal achiever.

Listen to Coach Steve talking about
Tracking Your Progress

There is an achievement axiom that you might have heard that is as powerful as any: “what gets measured gets done.” Though that little saying is pretty self explanatory – let’s look at it closely.

In order to truly set yourself up for achieving the goals that you set, it is imperative that your goal is set in measurable terms. A simple way to check that is to ask, “would an independent observer – someone that doesn’t know anything about me, be able to tell if I have achieved my goal or not?” For example, a person you don’t know would not be able to tell whether or not you make “more money” or not. They could, on the other hand, be able to tell whether or not you make $10,000 a month by simply looking at a pay check.

So if your goals as set in measurable terms, then you should also be able to measure incremental progress between where you started and where you are going. Now here is the subtle but incredibly important key: if you don’t measure your progress on your way to the goal, and instead only measure yourself on a pass/fail basis on simply whether the goal is achieved or not – yes or no – then you are setting yourself up for frustration, derailment and disappointment.

Goal achievement requires measuring progress and measuring progress is important for 5 reasons:

1. You won’t have anything to celebrate and therefore encourage yourself if you don’t measure the incremental steps of progress you make toward a goal.
2. You will always get frustrated with how long you are taking to achieve a goal unless you focus on progress rather than the end result only.
3. Because you have never achieved the goal before, you will experience many new things along the trail to the goal. If you aren’t measuring, you will miss important cues for when or if it might be necessary to adjust your goal based on new information or insight.
4. It will be easy to change your mind about a goal and unconsciously give up if you aren’t keeping it in front of your face with some sort of tracking system.
5. If you don’t measure you won’t have any benchmarks that will help you intelligently set new goals in the future. You need to know how long it takes, what resources you needed, where you get distracted of sidetracked…all sorts of things when you get ready to set a new goal. Otherwise, you will find yourself having to learn the same stuff all over again.

This week, if you have not already done so, set up a tracking method for the goals you have set. Don’t get too fancy: a spiral note book that you write in every few days is fine. The main thing is that you have someplace to keep your goals AND your goal achievement in front of your face with progress measured.

He shifted forward in his seat, straightened up a bit and literally lit up with a fresh, new excitement. He said, “A year from now I want to be in a new business!” He went on to describe that he felt that time was short for him (he’s now 48) and he’s not going to settle for spending the rest of his working life doing something he isn’t excited about. He was literally looking for permission to change his career path.

How about you? Do you feel that you’ve “experienced enough experience” and it’s high time to throw yourself into something you really enjoy? It might be a simpler version of what you are already doing, something similar but targeting a clearer niche or even jumping in to a new area altogether. But one thing is for sure: the experience you have in building one thing can certainly accelerate you along the pathway to a new thing… as long you are ignited by authentic passion and enthusiasm for the new direction.

It is very common that I will be talking to a new, prospective coaching client – someone that has finally called “Uncle” and is asking for help to get their business to a new level – and I’ll find that though they are very capable, smart, competent and certainly very busy, they are literally working their tails off…but doing it completely alone without consciously defining what tools and resources they have at their disposal that could make their efforts much less exhausting and much more rewarding.

Why is that? Why do we think we have to be the Lone Ranger when it comes to achieving big goals in business? Well, most of us are taught very well early in life to handle everything for ourselves: clean up our room, tie our own shoes, do our own homework, pay our own mortgage and so on. So, we easily get lopsided in terms of how we view the value of resources we might use to get things done. We get used to doing things totally by ourselves when, if we engaged other people to do some aspects of what we need to get done that don’t require our most valuable skills or thinking, we could get much more done in less time. We can even get used to simply paying for things to get done for us because money is easier to come by than the perceived effort of asking for help.

But you may say, “Hey! I’m very creative in getting things done without spending money or asking for help!” OK, but you may not realize that if you let go of a few dollars and/or pride once in awhile you would accelerate your goal achieving velocity while reserving your creativity and financial resources for times when they are really needed.

This week, as an assignment, I want you to consider your most important goal and purposely engage, recruit, invite or enable as many resources to assist you in achieving your goal as you can. Visualize yourself turning into one of those giant transformer robots kids play with – where you start out as a common, every day business guy or gal and instantly evolve into a mass of multiple appendages, weapon attachments, titanium-plated armor and x-ray vision prepared to conquer the most daunting of obstacles or threats. It’s you against the world but you’ve got what no other foe has and you have it in abundance: You’ve got Resources! At your command and control are other people eager to say yes to your request for help. You have an old book or CD series that has a golden nugget hidden inside you didn’t hear before. There’s a guy you’ve been saying good morning to every morning that you haven’t asked to join you for a cup of coffee and reflection on his lessons learned in 30 years in business. There’s an eager protégé just waiting for invitation to help you and learn from you along the way.

Think about it. What resources do you have that you aren’t using that when you do will turn you into a conqueror?

Having worked with entrepreneurs for over 20 years, I recognize the trait very well. “Idea people” tend to operate like Sam: not fully optimizing the now thing because the new thing looks more compelling.

Think about it. What are the now things that have great potential, profit, impact left in them? Guaranteed, if you fully optimize what you already have in motion whatever next will be that much richer.

How good are you at setting goals? Does it seem like sort of a crap shoot when it comes to actually experiencing results after you set a goal? It’s that way for many…that is until they discover how to go beyond setting goals and learn the keys to achieving goals.

Regardless of how many times you have been through goal setting seminars and motivational talks where the guru was chanting “you gotta have gooooals!” – try to open you mind to some new thinking on this subject. I’m about to bring you over 20 years’ experience in helping people set and achieve goals.

First, let’s get this distinction out of the way: there IS a giant difference between goal setting and goal achieving. Goal setting, though critical as a fundamental skill, is not nearly as relevant to your success as goal achievement skills.

To give you a refresher in a quick 30 second tutorial on goal setting — goals must be written, specific and measurable, achievable and believable and compelling to you personally. They should be of your invention and not defined by or even based on anyone else’s expectations of you. Goals have to be yours and yours alone and written down if you are truly serious about achieving them.

With that in mind, I’ll assume you have written goals for your business. If not, handle that immediately. Don’t let another week go by without purposefully and deliberately setting aside time to write down your goals. If you are saying right now, “I’ve got them in my head” or “I don’t need goals — I’m self motivated” or “I’ve never set goals and I have always been successful” let me just tell you, you’re kidding yourself. If you don’t have goals I can guarantee you that you are underperforming, utilizing roughly 1% of your potential and — without knowing you at all — I can predict you are not at the top of your field. Great goal setters are over-performing, maximizing their potential and at or near the top of their arena. Period.

So with that out of the way, we can define goal achievement.

Goal achievement is the action component of success. It’s the feet-moving part of putting ideas into action. And you know what? Many people really don’t know how to get their feet really moving. Once a goal is set to most people, it feels like a giant boulder that they have to throw their shoulder against. And when they have endeavored to do that in the past, the process is literally so back-breaking, they give up and decide it isn’t worth it. It is much easier to just sway with what life brings and accelerate where there is an opening and pull back when there isn’t.

Goal Achievement is about working a specific plan to achieve the goal, learning something from the actions you are taking, course correcting based on new information and then taking another deliberate step in the direction on the end target.

Let me say it again: First, make a plan. Second, get moving. Third, make sure the steps you are taking are part of a plan and if not, go back to step one. Next, pay attention so that you can correct or improve your plan based on new information learned while you were taking earlier steps. And finally, pick up and do it again – action that is – relentlessly, tirelessly and without hesitation or procrastination.

Goal Achievement — Go.

In every business I have coached that elects to hire employees, they either “get this right” – taking the time to find extraordinary people or none at all – or they spend a lot of time and money on employee turnover. Sure, during the life of your business you can expect employees to come and go. But if you start with only the best, you’ll find that your most powerful “secret weapon” becomes your people.