12 Steps to Success in BusinessLife

The purpose of this book is to share my coaching experience with you. I want you to benefit from what I have learned in the past 22 years working with over 5000 business owners and managers who were dealing with the challenges of starting and growing a successful business. I gathered the steps I use in my coaching process and created this book. I want to enable you to start with your intentions and end up with the success and happiness you desire. I recognize that most people go into business to make more money and have more free time to spend with their family. What they usually end up with is making less money than they did in their JOB and working a lot more hours than they ever expected. Unless people have help in setting up their lives to win in the game of BusinessLife, they will not accomplish their original intentions.

This book is designed to be a coach, giving you step by step coaching to set you up to win. As you go through the process and follow the coaching, you will experience a sense of having your hands on the dials and levers of your business. You will have the feeling that you are in control of your business rather than the business controlling you. This sense of power is what leads you to the right solutions for success.

You want to read this book from the beginning, taking one step at a time. Take your time and take notes. The ideas will work on you as you move through the process. You will want to keep a journal of ideas to take action on and put into your calendar. You want to read from a mindset of there is no right or wrong. Everything you have done up until now was necessary to get you to this point. Do not get stuck in the past. Always focus on moving from now into the future. When you have an idea you want to implement, put it into action by scheduling something in your calendar to make it happen. Ideas plus action plus time equal results. If you read the book and take no action, then all you get is a good idea, and ideas alone will not accomplish your intention. I promise you, there is a golden idea in this book for each and every reader that will, in fact, change your life forever.

All you have to do is find the idea and put it into action.

I use many words in this book in different ways. I call these Terms of Art or Distinctions. When you take a word and give it a special meaning, you create a tool used by those who understand the tool. For example, when you take a hammer and call it a Finishing Hammer, it becomes a special tool used by a body and fender repair person to take the dents out of your car. By distinguishing the tool as a Finishing Hammer, you give it special properties. I have done the same thing with words like BusinessLife. I created this distinction to show that they are not separate. Your business does not become your life, and you will not have a life separate from your business. They must exist in harmony. Together, they will use up your 168 hours per week; they are not separate and must be scheduled to co-exist in harmony.

As you read this book, you will see many of these Terms of Art/Distinctions. They are designed to have you look at your situation in a different way to give you more options. For example, Breakdown, is a disruption in the action, something that stops you from achieving your objective. You could say that is the same as a problem, and you would be correct. However, another distinction is the road to success is paved with well-managed breakdowns. If I said I was going to give you a lot more problems to help you get to where you want to go, you would probably say you already have enough problems. However, if I tell you we are going to create more breakdowns to get to our objective, and you believe the road to success is paved with breakdowns, you would agree and be willing to embrace the idea. So you can see that distinctions are designed to give you another perspective to the situation, giving you another option. Options give you choices, and choices give you power.

This book provides the tools to design and run your business for success. Thousands of business owners and managers have used these twelve steps as the path to accomplishing their intentions. What I have seen in working with my clients is that if they stay on the path, their intentions will manifest into reality. Will it happen in the time frame they want? No. It usually takes longer than we want. However, when you stay in committed action and persist, you will achieve your intentions. I will say that the result may not look exactly as you had expected in the beginning. It often shows up in an unexpected way. But the intention does, in fact, show up in your life, given you stay in the game with committed action.

I incorporate art before each chapter. Art is an expression of creativity, something most people do not associate with a book on business. I believe creativity is the foundation of business success, as each action we take is part of creating and fulfilling our intentions. I am as inspired by the process of painting as I am by the finished product. The same is true for the 12 Steps I use in coaching - each of these steps provides another opportunity for inspiration leading to your completed intention. I encourage you to sit with these images for a few moments and allow the creative process to inspire you as you implement the ideas in each chapter.

This book will provide you with ideas, structures, and coaching. It will lead you to the water. It will not make you drink. The book will not do it for you. It is not a magic solution. It will not give you some insight that you can sit and meditate on for days while you wait for your miracle to show up. This is a rocks are hard, and water is wet book that tells you what to do, but you must take the action. Many times, people read books and think that will solve their problems. However, unless you do something different, you will not benefit from the experience. Action is the root of results as long as there is an element of time allocated to take that action.

I work on the phone. I spend my days talking to people all over the world, listening and creating possibilities. My style is not to have the answer but to have a commitment. As two people committed to possibility, if we engage in conversation about any subject, we will find some action that the client can take to move the idea forward. Therefore, I do not come to the call with all the answers. I come with a lot of questions that will lead us to a possibility or a series of possibilities, which give us actions that can be taken to produce a result. Knowing this frees me and the client from the need to know the answer. Or the need to know the right answer. Too many times people get stuck in wanting to do the right thing and do not take any action because they cannot figure out what is the right thing to do. I coach you to give up looking for the right answer and look for what is possible and then the actions that lead to that possibility. Then choose a possibility and take action. Choice and Action are tools for success.

You will get the most value from this book by bringing your willingness to be coachable to the conversation. As you read this book, we are going to have a conversation. I will not try to convince or control you to do anything. What I ask is that you be willing to look at your situation through the coaching in the book. That willingness is all I ask. If, after you have looked and considered, you decide this approach is not for you, then I say thank you for being coachable. As long as you bring an open mind and a willingness, you will get the most value from the book and the coaching as we work together.

Since you purchased my book and began reading it, you have become my coaching client. We are now working together. Therefore, I want you to know that as your coach I am committed to your intentions once you complete them in Step 1. If you want to send me your intentions so I can know who you are and what you are up to, please do so. My email is Ralph@Consulting-2Win.com, and my web page is www.PossibilitiesUnlimited.com. I am very committed to my client’s intentions. My vision in life is Ideas Become Realities. Therefore, as you work on your intentions and progress through this book, you are delivering on my vision in life. We have become partners by virtue of this relationship.

Having a coach in life is a way to increase your performance and achieve your objectives faster. All great performers have coaches. Anyone who is up to something really big can benefit from the outside perspective of a coach. The coach is there to help determine goals and objectives, and deal with all the obstacles that they face on a week to week basis. A coach is like a business partner who is as committed to your success as you are, however when you win, he is not there asking for half of the reward. The coach stands on the sideline and gives you a second opinion on how to win the game. He gives you encouragement when you need it and tells you the truth when you need that too. A coach is a person who you can use to make decisions, and he will tell you the truth. He will not share your concerns with the rest of your company. You have a confidant that you can trust to work with and plan your course of action.

Coaching gives you the opportunity to think of bigger possibilities. I brainstorm as someone who will not have an opinion about you for your ideas. Coaching gives you access to all the experience of the coach and the thousands of other problems that the coach has helped solve. He will shorten the learning curve in both time and money. Coaching provides a wealth of ideas that you would not have access to in the normal course of your business. It also gives you access to the network of resources that the coach can provide. In short, it makes you a much more powerful manager and business owner.

As you read this book and take action, keep track of the possibilities you generate, and track to see how long it takes to turn them into a reality. I am always interested in the results people produce. Feel free to send me your accomplishments or questions. I am here to support you in your BusinessLife. Use the book as a workbook and follow each step one by one.

At the end of this book, I have also included exercises for each chapter and step. They will help you achieve success in the different areas of your BusinessLife. You can also download these exercises in electronic format at my website www.PossibilitiesUnlimited.com. As you climb the ladder of success, keep in mind that your results are a function of the action you take. Your next action is to read Step 1.

"Are we using our full potential to discover, create and communicate?"

- Quote Source: Convey blog

CONVEY

www.RalphWhite.com

Step 1: Creating an Unrecognizable Future

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The road to business success is paved with well-formed intentions. In my coaching practice, my client’s intentions create the big picture of our work together. We begin with intentions rather than goals because we usually derive goals from improving upon the past while intentions come from the world of unlimited possibility. For example, let’s say that last year my sales were one million dollars. This year, however, I want to work a little faster or tweak production and do 1.2 million dollars—that’s a goal based on past events. Instead of focusing on the past, intentions look forward into the world of possibility. From this expanded horizon, you form an intention that you can commit to and work on.

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Coaching Focus:

During a coaching session I asked a client what was next for him. He said, well, I ought to buy a piece of property and construct a building for my business.

He thought about it for a few more minutes and said you know there’s an empty lot down the street; I ought to check it out.

Out of the world of possibilities he generated an intention. Then, he acted on that intention - buying the lot, getting an architect and building a new place for his business.

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I have clients that I’ve worked with for 22 years who keep creating bigger intentions. By asking questions such as how do I make it more efficient, how do I make it go faster, how do I make it go smoother, how do I make it take less effort, how do I make it more profitable, business owners reach for continuous process improvement. No one ever needs to run out of a job because anything can be taken to the

As your intentions grow in scope, so do your challenges. There will always be some challenge that you’re working to overcome or problem to solve on the way to success. Often I find people are working on too small of a challenge or problem. So, when they solve it, they still don’t have what they’ve been striving for—instead they end up with maybe just enough money to pay the bills. I use intentions to steer clients into larger arenas with bigger problems and more opportunities for sensational results.

Entertain Way-Out-There Intentions

Here’s another thing about goals. Invariably, we all fall short of our goals about 80 percent of the time. Intentions, however, act as an insurance policy for your goal because they usually far exceed what we might state as a goal. And if you are taking actions towards achieving your intention, then the probability of attaining your goal goes up substantially.

So, your intention needs to be two or three dimensions bigger than your goal. Here’s an analogy—if you are on the beach looking at the ocean, your goal is between you and the horizon. You can see it. You