A wise person once told me there is no middle ground to business. The momentum of a business never stops. You and your business are always in motion; always moving. Whether this motion is forward or backward is your decision based upon your actions. If you want to change your business momentum—and the future and success of your business—then you must change your actions.
Simply put, there are two directions a business can move in: success and failure.
I know, for myself, that once I understood the backward motion of failure it became the greatest motivator for the forward momentum of success. However, time also taught me that I had to learn how to continue that forward motion in a positive way to encourage success to continue for myself.
Make the Choice of Success
One of the first principles of sales is that if you create two offers for people to choose from, they will choose one of them, even if only in their mind. That is when “the sell” takes root and begins.
In understanding the psyche of the brain, when given choices, the mind automatically chooses. Since I sincerely want you to choose success for yourself, I will place before you the options of failure and success for you to observe which one you are currently choosing. I hope that this will help you to either alter your course now or find the motivation to continue the course you are on.
The reality is that if you understand failure just as much as you understand success, it automatically becomes easier to head in the direction of success.
The Movement toward Failure
Failure is simply the result of choosing to not do what is required to keep a business growing. It is born in the smallest of decisions of avoiding the tasks that you know keep your business moving forward. Tasks such as not returning texts to clients in a timely manner, setting aside time for planning and budgeting, consistent marketing, quality customer service, ethical behavior, or striving to give the best massage possible for each client at every appointment.
This act of avoidance, or lack of commitment, is all about choices. They are choices that create the ability to move us backward, away from success and toward failure. The result of these choices are less appointments, less money, loss of a feeling of success or control, and potentially a closed business.
The Movement toward Success
Success is simply the result of choosing, every day, to do what is required to keep a business growing. It is acting in the opposite of the actions of failure. Since avoidance is the action that creates failure, then completion is the action of success.
I learned there is also one, secret ingredient that we each need to find the drive to complete tasks. That ingredient is motivation.
I have worked with many people that used the fear of failure or lack of money as motivation for success. However, either of those scenarios will only work for so long. The reason for that is hardwired in our brain. As an example, if you were working for someone else, would you rather be offered positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement for your efforts for that job?
We all would say positive reinforcement. Ironically, when you work for yourself and you use negative reinforcement to complete tasks for success, you are the one being negative with yourself. This is when business becomes a mental game and you become tired of never being enough for yourself. This is also when you find yourself avoiding tasks, an action that will lead toward failure.
So, the question then becomes, how do you create the positive reinforcement for yourself that then creates motivation?
The answer to this is success. Success in any form creates motivation, and motivation creates a drive for success. They are the two halves that create one motion. The more tasks you successfully complete, the more motivation it creates to complete more tasks. Any time this energy propels you forward, motivation becomes momentum.
Create More Success at a Business Momentum You Can Manage
Now, when I said more tasks, I didn’t mean a constant increase in tasks over time. That is actually setting yourself for failure.
What I mean is to pace your tasks in way you can complete them. You are then setting yourself up to experience success, thereby creating motivation to complete more tasks and experience more success.
I have learned to schedule out my tasks by month, week and day in a way that allows me to experience constant, small successes that feed motivation and business momentum. I find that when I overschedule myself and I can’t meet my deadlines, the simple act of failing to meet those deadlines causes me to avoid trying—and the downward spiral begins.
Plan Out One Month
Here is a simple guideline to begin to pace your tasks to create consistent motivation toward success:
• Take one main goal and assign it to an entire month
• Break down the goal to the exact tasks you need to do to complete it
• Separate the tasks out into the best order they need to be done in
• Divide tasks into four or five weeks
• Assign all the tasks to a week
• Then assign those tasks to days paying attention to how your business and personal life are scheduled
• Don’t assign big tasks to days you know you have limited time for
• No more than three tasks each day
• Spread those tasks out so you have two easy and one bigger task to complete.
• Make sure to check each task finished as complete and congratulate yourself on a job well done!
Choose Business Momentum & Choose Success!
Failure and success in business are truly based on the actions you choose to complete. My hope is that you will choose those actions of success to create the motivation within yourself to succeed now, and generate positive business momentum for your future.
About the Author
Amy Bradley Radford, LMT, BCTMB, has been a massage therapist and educator for more than 25 years. She is the owner of Massage Business Methods and the developer of PPS (Pain Patterns and Solutions) Seminars CE coursesand an NCBTMB Approved CE Provider.