Talent, Luck or Hard Work - Which matters most when it comes to success? (Part 1 of 2)
This article is a collaboration between Karen Van Cleve founder of Live Well Coaching, Nina East, founder of the Association of Personal Growth Professionals and PersonalGrowthPrincess.com.
So, is it talent, luck, or hard work that contributes the most to success?
According to Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success, talent and luck play a part in creating opportunities, but they are not the critical factors. What matters most is experience. Time in the saddle, as it were.
People like to think that inborn talent and luck have more to do with success than anything else - because that way there is a ready, reasonable example for why they haven’t achieved success they want for themselves. After all, if someone is born into a wealthy family, don’t you have more opportunities? Sure - at least what people generally think of as positive opportunities. And if you have a natural talent at something - say, brilliance at math - doesn’t that give you an advantage over someone else who isn’t very good with numbers. Sure it does.
But, what Gladwell documents so clearly, is that while those factors can play a small role, the real distinguishing characteristic is how much time and effort someone puts into something.
Is your virtual assistant letting you down?
As a personal growth professional - well, as any professional, for that matter - how and what your team does reflects directly on you. If they aren’t getting their jobs done, it affects your reputation, your clients’ satisfaction and progress, and your own sense of peace and accomplishment.
In a recent blog post, Kendall Summerhawk gives some great pointers on how to address missed deadlines, goofs, and the disappointment that comes when someone you trust and care about is letting you down.
She says the relationship you have with your virtual assistant, or any other team member, is like any relationship.
“At first, you’re both feeling the love and everyone is happy. But after a few months you may start noticing tasks slipping through the cracks or that you’re having to spend as much time tracking your assistant’s tasks as you used to spend doing them yourself.”
She offers 3 respectful and powerful tips you can use. What’s great about these tips is that they don’t make anyone wrong or make you out to be the “bad guy”.
The tip that struck me the most was Tip #2 - Have A Courageous Conversation.
You’d think we’d all be past this by now, but even the best business owners sometimes dream having “that” conversation. But that’s only because we’re making it mean something it doesn’t.
If you’re challenged by this, two great resources are
- the national bestseller, Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time, by Susan Scott (it’s on sale right now at Amazon) and
- What is The Emperor Wearing: Truth-Telling In Business Relationships by Laurie Weiss.
Enjoy!
Where does your “Aha” moment come from?
“Eureka, I’ve got it!”
That’s what Archimedes was reported to have shrieked as he jumped from the bathtub and ran through the streets sans clothing. It turns out he had just figured out how to calculate density and volume. Exciting, eh?
OK, so maybe not that exciting in this day and age. But what IS exciting is what this tells us about insight and where it comes from…and what this means to the personal growth profession.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal - Science Journal published an article called “The Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight”. In this article Robert Lee Holtz explains some of the latest research about how the brain creates breakthroughs, and why daydreaming may be a valuable business practice.
In our fables of science and discovery, the crucial role of insight is a cherished theme. To these epiphanies, we owe the concept of alternating electrical current, the discovery of penicillin, and on a less lofty note, the invention of Post-its, ice-cream cones, and Velcro.
There is new, strong evidence from the neuroscience community that the work we do as Personal Growth Professionals reaches far beyond the “feel good” effects. In fact, scientists at Drexel and Northwestern Universities have found that even before we are presented with a problem, our state of mind can affect whether or not we will likely resort to insightful thinking. People in a positive mood were more likely to experience an insight, researchers at Drexel and Northwestern found. “How you are thinking beforehand is going to affect what you do with the problems you get,” says Dr. Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University.
While we’ve known this intuitively for a long time, we now have science backing us up. Think about what this means for your next proposal. How might you use this to “make the case” for bringing personal development work into the business setting?
Researchers have been evaluating what is really happening in the brain just before a breakthrough. What they have found is that people who solve problems using insight are using their brains differently than those who solve problems analytically. Their brains actually generate different brain wave patterns because there are different brain mechanisms involved, according to psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
This isn’t actually a new thought, though the scientific research supporting the statement may be. Herbert Benson and William Proctor wrote about this in The Break-Out Principle, published in 2003. (For those of you who have been around awhile, you may remember Dr. Benson as the one who was laughed at for suggesting back in 1975 that heart disease, blood pressure and lifestyle were somehow related.)
What research is now showing us is that our brains may be most active - and at their problem-solving best - when we’ve lost track of our thoughts. Also known as “daydreaming.”
We used to think someone’s mind was empty when they were daydreaming. But apparently our brains have a mind of their own. 
Some of the complex problem solving parts of the brain scientists used to think were dormant during daydreaming, are actually activated - in fact they are “much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Think about how you would apply this in your business? What exercises and activities might you utilize to help people develop this part of their brain? How can you help business leaders understand the value this has for their bottom line?
You will want to read Robert Lee Holtz’s article to get the whole story.
30 Reasons Personal Growth Professionals Should Use Special Reports to Grow Their Business
Personal growth enthusiasts (your ideal clients) love special reports. They are chock full of information, they come in manageable bite-sized portions, and they answer a burning question or provide a solution quickly. That’s why they love them.
Personal Growth Professionals love them because they’re quick to make and easy to sell, which means you can make money from them - fast - plus spread the word about what you do. There are lots of ways to help your clients, promote your business, and earn money with special reports. In fact, I came up with a list of 30 ways!
But first, if you think you can’t possibly make your very own special reports, check out the Special Report Club and use the code “save10” to get $10 off your first month.
So here it is, my super list of Top 30 Ways to Earn with Special Reports (and by earning, you are spreading the word and helping people!):
1. Sell it - and keep all of the profits. The most obvious way of making money with special reports is to sell them.
2. Sell it through affiliates - and keep some of the profits. This is the similar #1, but your affiliates lead buyers to your sales page and pocket a commission from the sale. Remember, you have to REACH people in order to help them. How better to do that than via a special report that other people are helping share?
3. Sell it through affiliates - and give them all of the profits. How does this make you money? Well, you build a list of buyers plus you can earn money on the back-end, either by promoting other products in the report itself, or as part of the sales process, or both. And you get to feel like a do-gooder.
4. Give it away - and build your list. Use the special report as an incentive for people to join your list. Remember - the report needs to be relevant to your ideal client, and it needs to be well-written. If you aren’t a natural writer, or simply don’t have the time, seriously think about the Special Report Club.
5. Give it away - and make affiliate sales. Embed affiliate links in the report, and you can earn commissions by giving it away. Just add a “Resources” page or sprinkle affiliate links where appropriate. Of course, you want to do this with integrity and your reputation in mind. A report full of links is a bit of a turn-off, and even more so if the links are to products that are irrelevant or shoddy. Make sure that anything you recommend you believe in strong enough to stake your reputation on it.
6. Break it up into blog posts. A blog needs regular content. Write blog posts easily from a special report. Seriously - this is a great one! (Not sure about blogging, check out the Become A Blogging Maniac course.)
7. Give it away as a bonus to a paid product. Increase the perceived - and REAL - value of a paid product by including a special report - or several - as a bonus.
8. Combine them into an E-book to sell. Turn each special report into a chapter, add an introduction, conclusion, new title and cover, and you’ve got a brand new E-book to sell. Think about how great it feels when you can tell your clients about the book you’ve just completed.
9. Combine related special reports into an E-book, to give away. Same idea as #8, but you give it away for list building and/or affiliate sales.
10. Combine related special reports into a physical book, to sell. Turn the E-book from #8 into a book that buyers can publish-on-demand, such as on Lulu.com.
11. Use it as a basis for an article. Get the most actionable points from the special report, turn them into an article, and submit it to Ezine Articles or another online article directory.
12. Create an audio version to give away, or sell. Some people prefer audio products they can listen to while they’re on the go or doing other things. Give in to their demand by converting the special report into an audio report.
(If you don’t have an audio/recording service, I highly recommend Audio Acrobat. It’s simple, easy, quick, and you’ll create one of those fancy players with buttons in your email or website, without having to know anything special about web design or html code.)
13. Use a special report as the basis for tutorial videos - to give away or sell. Videos are hot nowadays, so turn a special report into video format for increased value.
14. Combine the audio and video versions into CDs and/or DVDs - and sell physical products. Physical products don’t cost a lot to produce, but have higher perceived value than digital products. And, as you well know, the personal growth industry is a multi-billion dollar industry!
15. Use the special report as the basis for a series of marketing videos to build your list and/or drive traffic to your site. Get 3-5 top tips from the special report and turn them into a video you post on YouTube and other video sharing sites, for instant traffic for your blog or site.
16. Use it as the basis for videos to promote affiliate products. Similar to #15, but use the videos to drive traffic to products you’re affiliated with, using your affiliate links.
17. Make it a prize on your Twitter giveaway. Want to get more Twitter followers? Offer a special report to all your new followers.
18. Give it away in exchange for answering an online survey to do market research. Set up an online survey and give respondents a free special report for their time.
19. Make it a surprise bonus for your clients or subscribers. Delight your existing clients with a free special report they didn’t expect to get and make them loyal to you, for life. Adding value is always a good thing.
20. Create a teleseminar out of the special report. Create a list of frequently-asked questions the special report addresses, and set up a teleseminar.
21. Make it a monthly resource in a paid membership program. Add useful special reports in the members’ resource area, or make it the featured content of the month.
22. Break it up into an E-course, to sell or give away. Chop up a special report to create an E-mail course or pre-recorded audio course.
23. Use the special report to create free Web 2.0 sites, such as Squidoo and Hub Pages. Create content for Squidoo lenses, Hub Pages and other Web 2.0 sites that promote your products and/or services, or affiliate products.
24. Break it up into autoresponder messages for your subscribers. Use the special report to give your subscribers useful information regularly.
25. Rewrite it to cater to a different or more specific niche within your target markets. With a few tweaks, you can make a special report appeal to a completely different niche or market. For example, turn a general self-help report into one just for work-at-home Moms.
26. Use the content to create a mini-site for affiliate marketing. Set up a mini-site (5 pages or less) to promote an affiliate product. Get content from a special report.
27. Create a podcast. Use a special report as the basis for a podcast, which can be in audio or video format.
28. Use it as an upsell or downsell to another paid product. Offer a special report to buyers of a related product.
29. Turn it into a brandable report for your affiliates to use to promote your product or service. Let affiliates give away a special report to draw leads to your site or list.
30. Cull out the most actionable tips from the special report and turn each one into a Twitter Tweet. Shazam, you’re an instant expert. Talk about increasing your visibility and credibility….
Surprise! I actually came up with 31 ways. Here’s the bonus:
31. Turn special reports into hand-outs, checklists or even main resource materials for a coaching program.
Ready to make money with special reports? You can jump-start the process with a special report, sales page, e-cover and more done for you month after month. Find out how at Special Report Club.
And don’t forget to use the discount code “save10” (without the quotation marks) to get $10 off your first month with Special Report Club.
Then all you’ll have to worry about is which of these 31 ideas you will do to earn from special reports!
Video: Is Web 2.0 kicking your butt?
Are you keeping up with the times, or are you falling behind and wondering if you’ll ever catch up?
Here is an excellent interview with Gary Vaynerchuk, host of WineLibraryTV, being interviewed on CNN, talking about how you really can do what you love and be a success…and that it requires you be fully yourself, really listen to and care about people, and yes, keep up with the technology times.
Podcast: Does your business scare you?
Most people would say that their business doesn’t scare them. But they would also say that there are things they hold back on - things they don’t say or do in their business - because of fear of what their clients might think.
That means there IS something about their business that scares them - namely that if they go too far out on a limb, customers will leave.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to my good friend, Tom Heck. 
Tom is the founder of TeachMeTeamwork - now known as the International Association of Teamwork Facilitators.
Recently he was telling me about an “incident” that occurred with his business - one in which he took a stand for something, biting his fingernails all the way.
And you know what - a bunch of clients DID leave, but Tom’s story shows how that was really a great thing…and what a difference it has made for him as he moved to take the next stand in his business.
Oh, and when something went really wrong - as in harassment - Tom did something that I bet less than 1% of the personal growth professionals out there would do.
While you listen to this recording - part of the Great Minds Roundtable - think about what you are currently holding back on? What are you afraid to tell your clients about yourself? What do you think would happen if you did tell them?
Think Big Manifesto? Do you have one?
Michael Port, author of the Contrarian Effect and the Book Yourself Solid series has just come out with what may just be his best book ever: The Think Big Manifesto.
The tagline for the book, “Think you can’t change your life (and the world)? Think again.” is right on the money based on what Michael delivers in the book. This is a book that every personal growth professional should add to their library - and probably one to consider incorporating into the work you do. (On this launch day Michael is offering some incredible deals for people who want to buy multiple copies to share with clients, colleagues, and friends.)
I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of the book, which I promptly carried around to read whenever I could find a spare moment. The first spare moment came when I was in the doctor’s office, waiting on a friend. I don’t think they’ll let me back there again! I used up every scrap of paper and brochure they had in order to take notes - and that’s because the margins of my copy of the book were already getting full.
I’ve known Michael for years, and while he’s always been someone who told it like he saw it, in The Think Big Manifesto he shares more of what he actually sees. It will challenge you, and inspire you. So make sure you carve out some time to read the book. In a sense, it’s a quick read - just 166 small pages - but it’s not just a “quick think”. : You will definitely be inspired to take action or make a change right away, but you’ll also find that the book sits with you, rolling about in your brain, pushing little buttons, sending up warning flares, long beyond the point of finishing the read.
If you haven’t already gotten your copy (or 10), I encourage you to go right away to get yours. I’m not kidding when I say 10 copies - this book is about coming together as a society, about revolutionaries collaborating, so you’ll want to bring your fellow revolutionaries along with you.
Plus, there are tons of giveaways, as you might expect.
Go straight to the Think Big Manifesto and start thinking BIG!
“Personal Growth” or “Personal Development”? Which do you do?
If you have a quick 2 minutes, take the survey!
Fear of Criticism - Is It Stopping You?
In August of 2008 I posted an article by Ali Brown about handling your critics. It seems that this topic is one that plagues many people - the successful aren’t excepted, they’ve just found a way to manage it so that it doesn’t get them down or stop them in their tracks.
The truly successful actually find a way to help the criticism SERVE them and help them become even more generous and understanding toward others. Does that sound remarkable to you?
You would think that a personal growth professional would surely have mastered this issue, right? Not so, my dear. I get emails frequently from members and readers who know they are on the right track, who know they are serving people in meaningful ways, yet still get stopped short when they get a biting or vicious response to an article, project, or program.
I don’t know that it’s a bigger issue for women professionals than men, but I have my suspicions.
I recently read a post by Fabienne Frederickson about how to get out of your own way by overcoming criticism.
It is excellent in many ways - one of which is the humanity that Fabienne shows by sharing that she was, at one time, someone who would have thrown some barbs. (Recognize yourself, anyone?)
One of her suggestions is Read the rest of this entry »
Why can’t coaches get certified?
As you know, I’ve been on the certification team at the International Association of Coaching since 2003. I love this part of what I do! It’s great to be a part of helping coaches make their mark in the world by claiming the excellence of their skills - and it feels great to give back to the coaching world in this way.
I’ve been surprised at how many coaches talk about wanting to become certified, yet how few actually apply. A year ago the IAC began using the 9 Coaching Masteries™ as the standard of excellence. Given how simple and straightforward they are, I thought many coaches would rush to apply for certification, but that hasn’t been the case.
I wanted to understand why, so I began my own “study” to see what was going on. (I use the term “study” loosely because I’m sure my method would not pass any academic scrutiny.) I have talked with about 100 coaches - coaches like you - to figure out what the biggest obstacles are to getting certified. I thought Personal Growth Professionals might be interested in what I’ve learned, as well as some resources that can help - some at no cost at all.
When I began, my hypothesis was that coaches would say the biggest obstacle to getting certified was their coaching skills. What I found out is that while coaches may need to improve their skills -hopefully we’re all on a continuous path of improvement! - the 2 BIGGEST OBSTACLES to getting certified were actually:
1. Not knowing IF their skills were good enough.
2. Not knowing what the certifiers are really looking for.
What that tells me is that it’s not that coaches think they need to work on their skills, but rather they don’t KNOW if they need to work on their skills or not. They may, in fact, be masterful coaches, but aren’t sure if they are ready for certification, in part because they aren’t sure what the certifiers are looking or listening for.
In other words, the biggest obstacle to getting certified is CONFIDENCE about APPLYING for certification.
Make sense?
I was actually pleased to discover this, because there are some great resources to address this very issue, and because it can be addressed quite easily.
Below are some resources I encourage you to consider,or share with someone you know who is considering certification. A couple are free, and a couple have fees.
Use what works for you - and let me know what you think.
