Making bad choices can leave you procrastinating over tasks and processes, falling down the rabbit hole of social media, or working with customers or companies that aren’t aligned with your values. Making better choices, however, helps you achieve your business goals in a more effective and timely manner.
The choices you make closely impact many areas of your business including productivity, core values, and professional development.
Do you feel like other business owners are able to achieve so much more with their time than you can?
How can you make better choices?
To help you avoid wasting your valuable time when working on your business and sales strategy, it’s always good practice to start with a plan of action.
- Goal Setting – understanding what you want to achieve in the year ahead gives you a clear overview and helps you make better choices around your use of time. If you’re finding that social media consumes all of your time, then perhaps it’s time to outsource that element of your business. If you never have time to nurture your existing customers, then a review of your time management may be necessary. Making better choices with your tasks, core values, and boundaries improves your mental health as well as your productivity. Without goals like these, business growth can be much harder to achieve so making simple but smart choices can directly impact your bottom line.
- Turn off distractions – your multiple devices bombard you daily with notifications from your email provider, social media platforms, and even the wellbeing apps designed to help you! Try turning off all the notifications on your phone during office hours. When working on a computer project, turn off any pop ups. Set aside a specific time to check your emails, LinkedIn comments, or fitness tracker.
- Boundaries – you need to be able to say no to anything that isn’t in alignment with your goals or values. Make better choices with the customers you work with, the events and invitations you attend and accept, and be able to outsource or delegate tasks that drain you instead of lift you up.
- Clear the clutter – stepping into a cluttered space feels off. You lose focus, can’t concentrate, and spend too much time searching for files. The more cluttered the space around you the more bad choices you make. Spend an hour decluttering your workspace at least once a week.
“Most of us who are weighed down by mental clutter – the to-do lists and calendar events catalogued in our brains – find a shocking amount of relief when we cut back on physical clutter. If your environment is less chaotic, your mind will be too.” Erica Layne
- Get organised – when setting goals, you need to break them into smaller chunks so they become SMART (specific, manageable, achievable, relevant, and timely). Schedule time to work on each stage of your goal.
The mindset of making better choices
Brene Brown gave a fabulous talk about spilt coffee where she asked the audience how many were ‘blamers’ – when something goes wrong you want to know whose fault it is. In the talk, she says how it’s preferable to know something is your fault because it gives you a semblance of control.
Through that control is where you get the opportunity to make better choices.
In business we often make bad choices due to rejection, but when a customer says no it can be liberating and even beneficial.
An exercise I found helpful in my corporate sales years was to put £1 in a jar for every person who said ‘no’ to me. This gave me a reward for receiving the no, but it also meant I was making a better choice by taking a positive action instead of stepping into the blame space. Doing this exercise can be incredibly helpful for your mindset in the current financial climate.
Let’s explore the word ‘choice’ and what it means for you and your business.
In its simplest term, choice is your ability to make decisions when faced with multiple options. These days, we are faced with an incredible number of options that can hinder our ability to make better choices in some cases.
From a business perspective, your customers are faced with the choice of which products or services to purchase. Are you making it easy for them to make their decision? Are you preventing your customers from making their own better choices? Sheena Iyendar shares a fabulous TEDx talk on the subject of choice – On The Art of Choosing.
No such word as can’t
If you are a regular visitor to my blog or social media channels you will have heard me talk about my dear dad and his words of wisdom. “There’s no such word as can’t” was a firm favourite, and it highlights the importance of making better choices.
When you deny yourself that control referred to in Brene Brown’s talk, you give in to the limiting beliefs collected throughout your life. ‘Can’t’ leads back to blaming others, which means we are no longer making wise decisions.
Avoid making bad choices by streamlining your business (and life). Use your time wisely and avoid unnecessary distractions.
You have control over the choices you make, and YOU can decide to make better choices so your business thrives.
How can you learn more about making better choices for your business?
If you want to learn more about making better choices for your business, schedule a virtual cuppa with me, and we can discuss how I can help you.
“I connected with Jules about a year and a half ago after hearing her speak in a Clubhouse room. She made an immediate impression with her transparent, authentic presence. We did a Zoom call and got to know a bit more about our businesses and one another. She graciously sent me a copy of her fabulous book, Live it, Love it, Sell it and blew me away with her mindset about sales. Successful sales people KNOW that a big part of success happens when you are simply yourself (returning right back to that transparent, authentic initial impression that struck me about Jules initially.)
Her book goes far deeper with strategies that will help you to be more authentic, less fearful, and much more successful if you are in sales for a living. (and who isn’t?) And although I don’t know the game really well, be sure to check her analogy about Five bare bums on a Rugby post… I’ll just leave it at that. Keep offering the wonderful training you do, Jules, I love all that you do!” Debbie Wemyss, Founder DW Consulting LLC
Alternatively, you can join my Sales Academy and build on everything you’ve learned in this post to create success in your business and deliver an unparalleled sales experience.
“I can say the Sales Academy is great value for money – just the monthly Q&A sessions make the fee worth it. I always leave with valuable insights on sales and business. And the modules (I’ve done so far, at least) are packed with useful info and mythbusting around sales.” Nick Diakanastasis, Public Speaking & Presentation Skills Coach
Join me for a ‘Walk down the High Street’ and see what the new Sales Academy looks like.
Want to find out more? Schedule a virtual cuppa with me, and we can have a chat about the membership or my other coaching services.