Reading The Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Some great insights into how to find interesting people, resources and opportunities by finding the edges where different cultures contribute to each other.

One of the core ideas promoted in the book is that in order to thrive you have to constantly be opening yourself to new ideas and to drive your performance to  higher levels so y9u can stay on top of change and use it to your advantage rather than get stuck in old ways and not be ready for new challenges and opportunities.

What can you do or be today to attract creative new ideas and people to expand your life and business?

Attitude is everything. And happiness is a choice not the result of what’s going on in your life. So get happy. Find the joy that your business can give you. There’s no point in being unhappy so you can create a happy life. It doesn’t work that way. When you’re happy, it will improve your business as well as your life.

In my last post I talked about learning to empty yourself of what isn’t essential and opening yourself to receive and amplify whatever gives you the most joy. When I work with clients that’s one of the most important ways I can help them get clear, get energized and take effective action as my tag line says. Do what you love and you will succeed. IF you do it well. Which should be a natural outgrowth of doing what you love.

But you have to love doing what you love as you’re doing it. When you are you let go of what isn’t essential and amplify what gives you the most joy. Naturally.

Great ideas are the source for getting great results from your business. But in order to get those results, you need to plug into the energy of those ideas. Getting the physical and mental energy to put your ideas into action comes naturally when you allow yourself to receive the full inspiration and motivation that idea can personally give you.

Did you ever fall in love with an idea? Did it stir up in you inspiration after inspiration? So you couldn’t wait to explore and test out all the ideas that spun off that core idea? That’s the way you can create your life as art everyday.

How do you do that? You learn to empty yourself of what isn’t essential and open yourself to receive and amplify whatever gives you the most joy. In my next blog post, I’ll tell you more about it.

I love Monocle magazine. Why? Because it exposes you to  a smorgasbord of intersecting ideas and cultural differences from around the world. Those intersections of the unfamiliar can create in you a new edge of awareness. Monocle gives you great insights into what’s happening in with business and culture in different countries. Each month it focuses on a different city worldwide and gives a great overview.

Out of creative intersections of different ideas and ways of looking at things you can get new solutions and better ways of doing things. Never stop growing and exploring!

You personally empower your business when you  choose to lead it not just work in it. As Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth series so clearly points out, you have to work on your business not in it. So often people create a business as a job for them to use their skills. Rather than build a living enterprise that supports them even when they’re not working. To do that, you have to be a leader. Yes you can create business systems and have employees follow them, but without leadership your business won’t flourish. Your leadership vision and energy only comes from making your  business about something greater than just making money.

Even if you don’t have employees, you have to be a leader for you customers and clients. Only when you claim, own and acknowledge that you are a leader  can you have a bold philosophy that encompasses all of your passion, talents and strengths. Only then do you have a level of commitment to playing big that will help you sail past all obstacles with joy instead of just dogged tenacity.

It’s the joy you have in exploring better ways to serve your clients that gives you magnetic attractiveness. It’s the curiosity and generosity you feel that keeps you looking for better ways to run your business. This only comes if you have a vibrant alive commitment to your values and what you truly care about.

You have to have a daily practice of nurturing, exploring and expanding your values in order to create a transformational business plan and keep exploring and integrating that into your business everyday. That’s where a coach or mentor can help you stay on track and see past the daily pressures and operational details to maintain  cutting edge growth for your business.

Often you can get much better results if you don’t just fix problems, you duplicate successes. I’ve known that intuitively for quite some time in the work I do with business clients. But it’s nice to see somebody write a book about it.

In the February issue, Fast Company columnist Chip Heath and Dan Heath, best-selling authors of Made to Stick, write a thought provoking excerpt from their new book Switch: Don’t Solve Problems, Copy Success.

They tell a great story about how Jerry Sternim, a representative of Save the Children was able to make significant strides in solving malnutrition among children in South Vietnam in just 6 months. He didn’t do institutional studies on the problems like so many people had done before to little or no effect. He looked for bright spots.

It turned out some kids were doing better than average. After asking  a few questions, he determined that the solution was just a matter of more frequent meals and a few additions to the diet that were easily available locally. He had the women who were feeding their children that way teach the other women in the village. And that spread to other villages across the country.

When it comes to more sophisticated westerners, it’s actually harder for people to overcome ingrained habits of seeing problems and not recognizing successes. We have a tendency to even see problems where there are actually successes. What I’ve found works is to transform the stuck energy of only seeing problems into an energized state of being open to solutions.

When you are alive to possibilities and energized to take advantage of them you contribute to your business being successful.  Here are 3 ways to enliven your ability to expand successes.

1. Let go of blaming and judging yourself for mistakes. Part of what can get you stuck in problem solving is simply the stuck energy of making yourself or someone else wrong. Let go of making things right or wrong. Destroy your need to judge and move forward.

2. Be grateful for successes and achievements. Gratitude uplifts you and opens you to receive more if for no other reason than you are in the habit of seeing and receiving what works in your life and business.

3. Get used to looking for what works. When you’re familiar with the energy of what works, you can see it faster and duplicate it more easily.

If you would like to get better at recognizing success and making more of it, I’ll be writing more  about it in my next post. Are you ready to change what keeps you from being more successful?

“The plan is useless, but planning is essential.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

Does your business support you financially and emotionally? If not, are you missing clear action steps that will help your business run smoothly? And get you the kind of results you’re looking for? I talk with a lot of people about their pain of not knowing what to do next to build their business. Is that what’s happening for you?

Would you love to move forward faster and with more confidence? Do you get sucked into daily tasks and overwhelmed by too much information and too many distractions? It can feel like you’re wading through a muddy swamp attacked from every side by blood-sucking mosquitoes.

To really know what to do next with your business, you need a clear plan. Many businesses run into trouble for lack of direction and run out of money simply because they never asked the right questions. They don’t do some simple market research that will tell them how to market themselves. They don’t formulate a clear strategy and a step by step plan.

So where do you begin? Start by getting feedback from your market. Ask a few well focused questions of both existing and potential customers. Read up on your target market. Find out the exact words people use to describe their problem. Ask yourself exactly how you’re going to solve that problem for them.

What makes your solution distinctive and more desirable? This is what business planning is all about. Discovering a need and providing a solution in a way that people can receive it and are willing to pay for it.

People have a lot of resistance to writing a business plan. They feel like it will limit them and cause them to get stuck in the solidity of the plan. Part of that may be true, but it can be avoided by dynamic planning. Use market research and an action plan as a springboard to inform your intuition. Step out of the mosquito infested swamps to the clear mountain view of your business. You’ll start to get a sense for how your business can support you both financially and emotionally.

Unless you’re raising money, you don’t need a formal plan. For many small businesses, 5-10 pages is plenty. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s going to keep changing anyway. The important thing is to ask questions, get accurate feedback from your market, apply the right strategy and measure your results. You’ll start to know in a very real way what works for your business.

Write it down and create a strategy. You’ll get a lot clearer. If you require some help, email or call me and I’ll be happy to brainstorm with you for 15 or 20 minutes at no charge.

One simple powerful idea well executed can make your company’s fortunes. But you have to gather and assign resources carefully. So if you’re in business or starting a business, ask key questions. Find out what’s essential for each aspect of your business. Your marketing, operations, finances… get clear and put it down in writing so you can refer back to it and update it as you go.

If you’re traveling into unknown territory, wouldn’t you rather know where the dangers are lurking and the hidden treasures are?

When you’re building your business focus your energy and resources on one specific area that will give the greatest market position in the shortest time. And keep in mind the big picture of where you want your business to go in 6 months a year, two years. It’s called the Beach Head Strategy.

In World War 2, the Allies invaded Normandy to get a toehold in France for a drive to Berlin. They put all their resources on that one bold move. Without it, it would have taken a far longer time to win the war having to supply troops in Italy.

It’s the same way in business. There’s usually one strategy that will optimize your resources to get strategic sales and profits. Tim Berry is the master of writing business plans. He just wrote an excellent blog post Don’t Underestimate Beach Head Strategy talking about how a focused business strategy is judged as too narrow a focus and an overall strategy is judged as too broad and vague.

Aside from potential investor criticism, it makes sense to write your business plan and marketing strategy in both focused and broad terms. You’ll be able to get the most immediate results from your resources while positioning them to gain your long term advantage.

Do you know how to energize and optimize your opportunities? We had a great teleclass yesterday on the latest Clear Your Blocks to Business Success free teleclass. It was about energizing your ability to leverage opportunities.

The key to energizing your opportunities is to be greater yourself. Find what really turns you on, what excites you in life and be explore that with joyful curiosity.