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Success Advice

Increase Your Resiliency to Increase Your Results

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When it comes to owning a business, you can face more uncertainty than the average paid person. To start your own business, you take a risk and a leap of faith, only to find yourself on what Darren Hardy refers to as “The Entrepreneur Rollercoaster”, exploring the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. It can leave you wondering whether or not you should throw in the towel or keep moving forward. 

According to a study in the Journal of Economic Psychology, entrepreneurial success was connected to the resilience of the entrepreneur with the critical indicator being resourcefulness. Luckily, resourcefulness is something that you can develop so when uncertainty or challenges present themselves, you know how to access solutions to them.

So how do you build your resiliency? Here’s how. 

Attributes of Resilience

Resiliency is defined as the ability to bounce back from a tough situation quickly. As a business owner, you have many different irons in the fire at any given time. Whether you own an organization with quite a few employees or you’re a solopreneur wearing different hats in your business, being a business owner is demanding, challenging, and requires you to be able to pivot into solutions as fast as you can. This is where resilience in sticking with finding the right solution is key. In order to strengthen your resilience, you first have to know the attributes that create it —hardiness, optimism, and resourcefulness. 

“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.” – Dr. Steve Maraboli

Hardiness

Hardiness is your ability to reframe stressful events so that you can get through them with less negative effects. Reframing is where you take a thought, situation, or idea and look at it from another perspective. For example, if you get cut off by another driver on the freeway, you can get angry or you can reframe the situation by saying, “That person might be in the middle of a big emergency. I hope they’re okay.” By reframing the situation, you can shift your emotions to serve you instead of stress you.

One study found that when it came to negative life events, hardiness was the one factor across the board for both men and women that decreased psychological and somatic distress levels. To increase your hardiness, practice reframing challenges, perspectives, and situations. You can do this in a few ways. First, you can simply practice in a journal with hypothetical situations. 

Here are a few that can get you started: 

  • The power goes out and you can’t meet your deadline for a project because of it. What do you do?
  • You’re headed to an important Zoom meeting and spill coffee down the front of your shirt. What do you do?
  • A team member is continuously turning in their work late. How do you handle it?
  • You’re feeling down because you got into a fight with your significant other, but you’re about to meet with your most important client. How do you pick yourself up?

The more you practice reframing these scenarios from problems into solutions, the more prepared you are to be flexible and quickly improvise fixes when challenges arise. If you’re facing challenges right now as you’re reading this, practice reframing the situation. There are a couple of ways to do this. Here are some questions you can ask yourself that will help you reframe the situation: 

  • How is this challenge asking me to show up differently so I can move past it?
  • Where is the win for me in resolving this situation?
  • What can I learn from overcoming this challenge?
  • How can I shift this challenge into a win?

When you ask yourself the right questions, you focus on new opportunities and solutions that might not otherwise be readily apparent. This reframing exercise also helps with another attribute of resilience—optimism. 

Optimism 

Optimism is the idea or belief that things are going to turn out well for you. When you hold this belief, it doesn’t matter how hard things appear to be, your mind is programmed to look for the win instead of surrendering to the stress of the challenge. Practicing optimism is something that can help you pivot from negative feelings to positive feelings more quickly so that you’re focusing on the direction you want to go instead of the barriers in your way. It is why reframing to look for the positive is so powerful because it programs you to only look at possibilities.

“In the face of adversity we have a choice. We can be bitter or we can be better.” – Caryn Sullivan

Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness is your ability to find, create, and connect with the resources you need to reach your goals. This can be in reference to the mentoring and advice you need, the funds you need, or even the physical goods you need. The idea is to teach your mind to be flexible in how you consider situations and determine all possibilities—even those that may appear farfetched because those ideas may branch off to a real solution. In other words, teach yourself to get creative with how you think. 

For example, if you have a problem you’re struggling with, one exercise you could use is the mentor round table exercise. To do this, you write your problem on a piece of paper and set it down in the middle of a table. Then you choose five people you respect and you ask yourself, “What would that person say about this problem?” This exercise gets you out of your regular pattern of thinking and allows you to creatively approach your situation with a new perspective so you can find new resources. The more different these people are, the more diverse the perspectives or solutions will be which can enable you to get more creative. If you can’t imagine what they say, you can always ask them or else find a new set of people that can give a fresh perspective that you hadn’t thought of. 

Building on your muscle of reframing, directing toward positive outcome and creative problem-solving, you will increase your hardiness, optimism, and resourcefulness as well as strengthen your resiliency to get the results you desire.

Kellee Marlow is an Impact Entrepreneur, Business Strategist, Empowerment Accelerator, and Motivational Speaker. She built her career by embracing disruption and identifying innovative concepts and technologies that challenged companies and people to think differently. After 20+ years of business experience in different roles and industries, Kellee has created a catalyst mindset that is science-proven, focused on empowerment, innovation, and inspiration that guides people to successfully realize their entrepreneurial or personal goals. She is the founder and host of Spark, on KXSF.FM and 8+ online platforms that stream world-wide. Kellee created the Spark platform to inform, inspire, and ignite her audience by pinpointing the underlying value of the expertise from change-makers in psychology, wellness, business, and innovation. She tackles topics including the future impact of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency; career reinvention and self-empowerment tools like empathy, gratitude, and social fluency.

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Success Advice

How to Alter Your Business Approach With Technological Advancements

Keeping up with technological trends has become a challenge for almost every business owner.

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altering business approach
Image Credit: Midjourney

Technology’s evolution has impacted everything, and business is no exception. Keeping up with technological trends has become a challenge for almost every business owner. Entrepreneurs unable to do so are being wiped out of the market.

There is no doubt that AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) have taken over the business world. These technological advancements are impacting decision-making, success percentages, and other entrepreneurial aspects.

Adapting to these developments is integral to business success. Let’s explore how you can accomplish these milestones.

Embed the strength of AI and ML.

AI has modified business operations in major ways. For instance, companies have employed bots for customer support. These bots go through an effective learning process via Machine Learning before being able to answer like humans.  

Bots can also perform detailed data analytics and make business moves with high success percentages.

ML is used more for the analysis of data chunks and generating successful predictions. This simply means that business owners do not have to worry about large-scale financial losses. 

In terms of deployment and usage, a reputed company like Netflix employs machine learning for decision-making.

Blockchain is increasing the count of business opportunities

Tampering of financial transactions is quite common and causes severe monetary damage to customers. With the rise of digital payments, this risk has increased. 

Blockchain is used to elevate your experience for monetary transfers. It combats penetrating events to extract confidential customer information. 

Most business sectors are using block chain but finance and supply chain management sections have a higher count. These two corporate sections have several monetary deposits and withdrawals taking place. 

In terms of percentage, approximately 72% and 5% of finance and supply chain firms have implemented block chain successfully.

Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning and Individual Development

You invest in learning some of the very important skills, including digital marketing, financial management, and how to gain customers as an entrepreneur.

You need to set up your knowledge base about doing business on Coursera and Udemy with the basics that are necessary for the business, building further by networking with experts through webinars.

Besides, Agile methodology will introduce elasticity to your company: this review and feedback system with further correction regularly will allow for enhancing efficiency and promptly reacting to the market.

Developing key skills to achieve goals

Running a business successfully is not only about having niche/domain knowledge. Business owners need to have communication / soft skills as well in addition to niche information.

Here are some key technical/domain-related areas that business owners should have a strong grip on.

Data Storage on Cloud: These days, companies do not store their data on physical servers. Therefore business owners should know how data is stored/edited/removed/updated via AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other platforms.

Data Analysis/Interpretation Qualities: These days, data is as precious as gold. Business owners with data analysis abilities make correct predictions. As a result, their ventures grow in volume.

Development/Coding Knowledge

Programming knowledge gives business owners an edge whether the application is developed in-house or outsourced. It assists in getting updates deployed and handling application underperformance without getting professional support every time.

Hacking proof framework

There is no benefit of having an advanced automated system if can be penetrated. Successful business owners have above-average knowledge of cyber security and hacking attempts. They are able to choose top-notch anti-hacking software without much of an ambiguity.

Communication Abilities/Soft Skills

Here are some key communication qualities that business owners should have:

Communication/Conversation: Business owners should use to-the-point sentences in both written and oral communication.

Issue Resolution Abilities: Business owners should be able to drill down to problems and solve them. This is done successfully only if an entrepreneur has in-depth business domain knowledge.

Agile Implementations

It is mandatory for business owners to have knowledge of iterative/agile models. With such a competitive environment, it is impossible for business owners to succeed without adopting an agile framework.

Create a productive well-crafted Business Strategy

A productive business venture starts with a clear vision. The first factor making a business successful is the idea behind it. It helps with endless growth and combating competition successfully. Katherine Philips once mentioned that business goals are inevitable if goals are set concretely.

  • Goals should be based on smart achievements instead of complexity. Focus on the value that each one of them adds. 
  • Business objectives should not be vague. Key indicators should be constructed to measure the success/failure of each milestone.
  • Be realistic when setting goals. Do not aim at impossible milestones since they can be demotivating.
  • Milestones/goals need to be time-bound. Set a completion deadline for each one of them. 
  • Business goals should not be alien. Owners can think out of the box but not be obsolete / unrelated.

Create a productive well-crafted Business Strategy

Business owners cannot succeed without having a network. Some tips help in this case. Attend conferences and professional gatherings to connect with other entrepreneurs.
Here are some other related points business owners should pay attention to.

  • Attend meetings and conferences to stay updated with trends and meet business owners who already have well-set ventures. This helps in enhancing the learning curve of new / growing entrepreneurs.
  • Being a part of business communities/groups is very productive. When one shares opinions and discusses decision-making tactics, it helps in preventing errors and enhancing success rate.
  • Even the most experienced business owners have mentors as learning never stops. Take part in mentorship programs so there is an assurance that you are following the correct roadmap.

Conclusion

There is absolutely no doubt that business dimensions have evolved with technological advancements. Successful entrepreneurs have grabbed these changes in due course of time and continue to evolve. On the other hand, people following old paths and conventional steps fade out of competition. In a nutshell, keep an eye on the processes and practices you follow as these factors decide success rate.

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Success Advice

Understanding the Power of Yes and No: How to Create Boundaries For Success

These words have a significant impact on how our success unfolds

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Creating legal boundaries
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The two smallest yet most powerful words in life, “Yes” and “No,” have a big impact on our growth on both personal and professional levels. In addition to affecting the choices we make every day, these words have a significant impact on how our success unfolds. (more…)

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Motivation

From Couch Potato to Go-Getter: A Step-by-Step Motivation Plan for Everyone

By understanding what motivates you, you can turn your dreams into reality

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How to be motivated
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Are you tired of feeling like a couch potato? Do you want to transform your life and become a go-getter? You’re not alone! Many people struggle with motivation, but the good news is that change is possible. (more…)

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Success Advice

10 Micro Financial Habits for More Wealth and Peace of Mind

The World Economic Forum still reports that half of U.S. adults lack financial literacy

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micro financial habits
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You’ve heard about developing financial habits, but what about micro-financial habits? Micro habits are the tiny things you can do every day with minimal effort that, together, transform your future. (more…)

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