What is holding you back?

I recently went on a weekend retreat with several members of a group I started many years ago. The agenda was simple. All each participant had to do was answer one question: What holds you back? You could discuss personal, business, relationship issues or anything important to you.

Without a doubt the most common answer was – ME! I hold myself back. As we probed deeper we heard such things as:

“I am afraid of failure/success.”

“I fear rejection.”

“I need to forgive.”

“I know what I need to do but I am not doing it because it is not fun.”

“I need to be liked.”

“I am not a salesman.”

I could go on but you get my drift.

My experience is that business skills are easy to teach but the beliefs we have about ourselves are the deciding factors.

Can you put your biggest fears out for all to see? If you say “no,” you will have serious problems overcoming them. They lose much of their power once they are shared with others.

Each of us had a chance to put our issues on the table for the world to see. It took courage, intestinal fortitude and a willingness to risk it all. What I found was the group was supportive, nonjudgmental, accepting and each and everyone expressed a sincere effort to understand and help me go deeper.

My awaking was that we all suffer from the flaws of being human. Though I was in the room with people I consider to be successful, I realized we are all human, we all have our fears and doubt AND we are all capable of more.

Share your fears and risk being human. You will find another human will respond. It is liberating to feel heard and understood.

I now know what “I am not done” means to me.

Thanks to all who shared a powerful weekend with me. You know who you are.

Ron Finklestein
330-990-0788
ron@businessgrowthexperience.com
www.aboutbusinesssuccess.com

Why Relationship Skills Matter.

We all belong to the human race. It is a simple sentence and a statement of fact. There are many assumptions made in that statement. One of the primary assumptions is we belong to the human race. Because of our membership in this august society, we know how to build safe, effective, successful and lasting personal and business relationships that allow all parties involved to grow, prosper and get results.

I am not sure this is a valid assumption.

Why? Though we have much in common, many of us have not been taught know how to build rapport, connect with others, understand the best way to support others and know how to ask them to support us. This is evident by the divorce rate; as many as 50% of marriages end in a divorce (Source divorcerate.org.) What is interesting to me is that the divorce rate drops the older we get. For example the divorce rate is 38.8% for American males age 20-24 versus 6.5% for American males age 35-39. It would seem the old men get the more they understand relationship strategies.

The question is how can we shorten that learning curve?

In business, according to Grant Thornton, 97% of all business owners want to strengthen the customer relationship.

SCORE suggests that 64% of all small businesses fail because they do not know how nor do they understand the value of marketing. Marketing is nothing more than a process through which companies build strong customer relationships. Can you imagine how simple life can become when you understand this and implement relationship strategies in your business?

I could go on but you get my drift.

To address this problem, I teamed up with Dr. Tony Alessandra, one of the world’s foremost relationships strategies experts, to create a web site that teaches you how to build safe, effective, successful and lasting personal and business relationships. The web site is called People Smarts. In this site we address relationship strategy issues, presentations skills, collaborative selling skills, marketing, personal growth and development, how to treat people the way they want to be treated and a host of other important and powerful topics that, when applied, will help you create more effective relationships to get the results you want and need. The site contains a full array of videos, eBooks, PDFs and MP3 to support you in your personal, sales, business and leadership development needs.

We invite you to explore and try out this site. In lesson one (which you have access) you will learn the different between the Golden Rule vs. Platinum Rule and experience the overview of all functions of relationship strategies. In addition, you will receive an introduction of the two dimensions of behavior. In this lesson, you will be presented with a very simple model that has been validated with hundreds of thousands of people.  It is a powerful guide you can use to improve communication and morale, build better work groups, and develop better relationships with co-workers, supervisors, customers, vendors and others.

I invite you to give People Smarts a try. To learn more go to www.akris.net. If you have questions please feel free to call Ron Finklestein at 330-990-0788 or email him at ron@akris.net. This powerful tool can also be used in you place of business for all your employees. If you would like more details about this opportunity ask Ron and he will provide the details.

Ron Finklestein

www.peoplesmarts.ws
admin@peoplesmarts.ws

330-990-0788

The key to success is……

I received this email from Larry Crane. Though I have his release program, I love the story in this email so much I am sharing it (including his links). I have the release program and I use the release program, I leave it to you to decide if this program is for you.

Here goes…

Once upon a time, in a place that could have been any place, in a time that could
have been anytime, there was a beautiful house with a beautiful garden
surrounded by a rock wall.

One day the woman of the house saw three old men with long beards sitting on the
rock wall around her garden.

The women went outside and said to the old men:

“I don’t think I know you, but perhaps you are hungry. Please come into my home and I will prepare some food for you.”

To which one of the old men asked:  “Is the man of the house home?”

“No, not yet” she answered, “he has gone into the town market, but he’ll
be back soon.”

“Then we cannot come in” replied one of the elderly man.

Later in the day when her husband arrived home, the women of the house told him what
had happened.

The husband replied, “Well, tell them that since I am now home they can all
come in for something to eat. I have brought fresh loafs and fruit from the
market.”

So the woman went outside and again invited all three elderly gentlemen into her
house for something to eat.

“That is very welcoming of you, but the three of us cannot come in all at once”
replied one of the elderly gentlemen.

“Why not?” asked the women.

In that moment, one of the old men pointed toward the other two and said,
“His name is Wealth, his name is Success. My name is Love. Go inside and
ask your husband which one of us three you would like to invite in.”

Rather confused, the women went back into her house and recounted the situation to her
husband.

The husband upon hearing of the story got very excited and said, “Marvelous!
Since that is the case, let’s invite Wealth in so he can fill our house with
abundance.”

The wife did not altogether agree. “Why don’t we invite Success in? We could
do with more success trading at the market.”

The couple’s young daughter who was listening in on the conversation from another
room, rushed in and pulled at her mother’s apron pleading with her mother and
her father, saying, “Please, please, invite Love in. Then our home and my
lonely heart will be filled with Love.”

After a moment of silence the father said, “You’re right. Let’s listen to our
daughter. Go and invite Love in to be our guest.”

So, the women went outside once again and asked, “Which one of you is Love? We
wish for the one of you called Love to be our guest.”

Love stood up and started to walk up the brick path toward the women and the house.

And then…

The other two elderly men also got up and started walking up the brick path toward
the women and the house.

Surprised by all three men coming toward her the women of the house said, “I don’t
understand, you said all three of you couldn’t come in and I so I only invited
Love in. Why are you other two also now coming in?”

All three elderly men responded in unison, “If you had invited in Wealth or
Success the other two of us would have stayed behind. But you have chosen to
invite Love in, and wherever Love goes, Wealth and Success will ALWAYS
follow.”

Neat little story, huh?

And the moral of the story, as I’m sure you have already grasped, is this:

LOVE IS THE SECRET TO RECEIVING ALL THE WEALTH & SUCCESS YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.

LOVE IS THE SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM.

The more you fill your life with Love – the easier life gets.

Are you ready to invite Love into your life (so Wealth & Success follow)?

Click here if you are.

Love,
Larry Crane
p.s. I totally agree with this and I am not getting any money to promote this product. I like the story, I agree with the story.

May your life (and mine) be filled with Love, Wealth, Success.

Ron Finklestein
Http://www.businessgrowthexperience.com
330-990-0788
ron @ businessgrowthexperience . com

I run several Business Mastery Advisory Boards (learn more at www.rpfgroupinc.com) that are designed to drive the nine behaviors all successful people implement. These behaviors are documented in the book Nine Principles for Inspired Action: A New & Targeted Perspective (available on amazon.com).

Many business owner do not know what needs done but not how to do it. When asked why they did not address the problem, the reason I hear most is: “I do not know how.”

I find this to be a lazy reason from not doing something. When I ask them to commit they say I will try. LISTEN UP LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! There is no trying. There is only doing. In this economy we need action that leads to purposeful results, not action that leads to trying.

That is why an advisory board is so important. You have your peers to help you. You share best practices that save you time, energy and money. You receive objective feedback from people who care for you and your success. There are no hidden objectives.

I have one member in my advisory board (learn more at www.rpfgroupinc.com) that talks about quality of her product and the value her company provides. This is strange because she cannot define either in a way that allows the customer to understand or in a way that reflects the value of her product or services. If you cannot define it you cannot do it or achieve it – it is that simple.

She does not have to know how to do it, all she as to do is start doing something. Building the kinds of processes I am talking about requires documenting what you do now. If you do not know what you are doing, make something up and start doing it.

There is hundreds of training programs out there whose purpose is to help you acquire the skills you need. I use iLearningGlobal to help me when I am stuck and I use this tool to help my clients when they are stuck. To learn more go to http://www.ilearningglobalnow.net

Watch a few videos. Take some notes. Each video is only 6-9 minutes in length. That is one half of one percent of your day so do not tell me you do not have time. Listen to billionaire Bill Bartmann discuss how he used goal setting to go from bankruptcy to $500M in assets in five years. 

Begin learning from your mistakes and learn from the mistakes of others. Learning is essential to success; especially if what you are doing you have never done before. Success is nothing more the learning to fail forward. Let’s others help you to fail forward.

Ron Finklestein
www.akris.net
ron@akris.net 
330-990-0788