Rules of the Game FREE Business Plans!

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 2 Comments

Explaining the Game!

Hi Everyone!
I know that you are all getting geared up for next year and I’d like to help.
I’d like to take a moment to invite you to a few special sessions of my FREE small business coaching series. For years I’ve used Coffee, Tea, You and Me as a wonderful outlet to facilitate the advanced networking education of small business leaders in the area. As a result, I’ve had a tremendously powerful impact on many small business leaders and have been inspired to use this venue to conduct a workshop and contest for small business owners to create their own word-of- mouth marketing plan for the upcoming year.
That’s right, for the next 5 or so weeks we’ll be helping our clients and contestants to create their own personal winning strategy. I’ll be right there to guide you in the development of a plan for phenomenal success in the next year. The winners of the contest will receive thousands of dollars in prizes and gifts! If you’d like to check what others have said about our skills, I invite you to review our testimonials here.
Be prepared to take lots of notes and to introduce your business to more than twenty other professionals. Feel free to hand out your business cards and brochures.
This website will be our online meeting place, and will contain the information you’ll need to participate.
Professional transformation is yours soon and I can’t wait to help you unlock your plan for success. Welcome to your revolution!
Stay tuned every week to see updates to this post and join the game at any time!

Ready to get started? Read on!

Focus Your Ultimate Mission with Purpose (4-4)

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 12 Comments

“A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it. He should make this purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts. It may take the form of a spiritual ideal, or it may be a worldly object, according to his nature at the time being; but whichever it is, he should steadily focus his thought forces upon the object which he has set before him. He should make this purpose his supreme duty, and should devote himself to its attainment, not allowing his thoughts to wander away into ephemeral fancies, longings, and imaginings. This is the royal road to self-control and true concentration of thought. Even if he fails again and again to accomplish his purpose (as he necessarily must until weakness is overcome), the strength of character gained will be the measure of his true success, and this will form a new starting point for future power and triumph.“- James Allen

There simply is no mission without purpose. Without purpose, you are left with a series of misguided, unfocused, lonely, irrational sets of behavior and action that ultimately leads toward nothingness or worse yet oblivion! This may be familiar to some of you as we all have a friend or two that is consistently hopping from job to job or from one deep meaningful relationship to yet another torrid love affair. We all know people that can’t make tough decisions even if their very life depended on it. Don’t get me started on our general sense of societal malaise and obvious lack of creativity. It seems that today’s fast paced high powered world is simply marred with mediocrity; substandard ideas, from mindless people seeking marginal results. If this describes you or someone close to you, don’t get upset, I’m just the messenger! You see without a clear purpose, all of us fall victim to this kind of thinking and we all participate in our own destruction by bringing forward and institutionalizing ideas that put downward pressure on our very society. In my humble opinion, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you are better off doing nothing. I’d rather have you in my way, than on the way to nothing. Besides, there’s a better than average chances that you are not out there by yourself. There’s probably someone that you work with or care about blindly following you off the cliff! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mission Series Tagged With: focus your mission, james allen, mission, passion, purpose, ultimate mission

Mission Tells How Objectives Are To Be Met (3-4)

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 17 Comments

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
-Sun Tzu

It’s all about strategy!

In this writing, we hope to help you to clearly understand the mechanics of personal, interpersonal and organizational missions and how they apply to the achievement of real solid goals. If you’ve been following my blog, by now you should realize that there is a subtle distinction between vision and mission. For our purposes here and in my entire VisionQuest90 „¢ system, we consider “vision” a statement of where we are going; then “mission” a statement how we intend to travel. We have to clarify this because these two points are often confused in the popular literature, worst yet in the corporate strategic plans of quite a few major organizations and municipalities. The ideas of vision and mission must exist simultaneously. If not, organizations will not be able to define a rational reason for their existence nor will they be able to garner support along the way. The same is true for interpersonal and family planning.

You see my friends; mission itself actually sets the tone and begins to outline several critically unique ideas, mission: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mission Series Tagged With: mission, mission framework, reaching objectives, strategy

Use Mission to Clarify Responsibility in Absolute Terms (2-4)

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 18 Comments

“Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the road which lies ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the road back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that one as well.” – Maya Angelou

I love the quote above for several reasons. It helps us understand and provide a framework for accountability to ourselves. It helps us begin to recognize our basic responsibility to continually make informed choices for everything that we do in life, always with a careful remembrance of our past learning as we establish our future course of action. Even to the extent that our future assumptions are incorrect we must take the required detour onto a new path. It’s also important to be committed to your path but not so over committed that you are inflexible to change when change is obviously necessary. There is a careful balance between passion and goal orientation that must continually be monitored and updated. Yes, you have to plan to plan and keep planning and don’t forget to plan for that which you can’t plan, the unknown. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mission Series Tagged With: commitment, mission, nature of commitment, planning, responsibility

Mission is Critical to All Human Endeavors (Mission 1 of 4)

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 16 Comments

Like the “chicken or the egg” idea, it’s easy to get confused between “mission and vision”. We’ve got a simple and clear answer to this dilemma. Like the chicken and the egg, vision and mission are inextricably linked and individually valuable. It doesn’t really matter which comes first because they both must exist and grow with each other simultaneously. If vision is a statement of where and individual or organization is going then mission is a statement of how they plan to get there. This statement to be effective must answer some essential questions. It must deal with; the recognition of who we are today, why our organization exists, what are the essential responsibilities for which we are willing to be held accountable and who are our major stakeholders and clients? Most importantly it should deal with our objectives and the reasons for them, including the underlying values and principles. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mission Series Tagged With: human endevor, mission, relevency

What is The Perfect Follow-up Strategy for Today’s Active Networker?

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 4 Comments

Just a few weeks ago I asked this magical question to all of my contacts on LinkedIn. The answers that I got were absolutely fantastic! I can’t wait to share them with you here. After I throw my two cents in, I’ll be summarizing some of the best answers. Here we go!

When I think of follow-up, my mind naturally begins to remember methods that pushy self absorbed sales people have used on me in the past. Here are some of the issues I’ve had to face. I’ll bet that you will identify with at least a few:

They don’t even know my name
They haven’t gotten my permission to contact me
They talk to me only about their offer or why I should be interested in them
They don’t prove any level of competency that even a reasonable person would trust
They fumble through a canned presentation
They’re too familiar (I don’t even know you for heavens sake)
They don’t even tell me how they came to contact me (I really want to know which of my idiot friends put you up to contacting me)
hey ask stupid questions like “would you like to save money or make money Mr. Powell” (my answer is “NO-click”)
They follow the same old sales tactics that didn’t work when I actually did answer the phone
They offer no real value up front (really why should I listen to you or call you back?)
They pass me on to someone that really knows what they are talking about (Did I say that I hate that? Just in case, I HATE THAT!)
I know more about their products or services than they do
They argue with me about what I want (If I don’t know what I want by the way, they tell me that their product is the solution for everything I could want)
They make outlandish unsubstantiated claims
They make no promises or interesting claims at all

Vision Defines Purpose (Vision 5 of 6)

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 38 Comments

If Vision is our sense of destiny; a sacred understanding of where we are going, then purpose is its more meaningful partner. Like yen and yang, these two ideas are each other’s greatest compliment. Neither can stand alone very well without the benefit of the other. Of course, you can have “vision” with no purpose, but there won’t be meaningful results. We need to have a compelling reason to engage in any change of behavior. “Purpose” is most often defined as the anticipated result that guides decision making. That’s right when you are moving with purpose; you are simultaneously anticipating an outcome. You’re thinking about your end game with some reasonable expectation. Your results can be either positive or negative but the results are inevitable.

Purpose quite often has two characteristics: it provides meaning and simultaneously answers the question “why”. It’s easy to decide on a destination that you want to reach in life. The hard part is providing a sense of contextual meaning or reason to that destination. Without a good compelling reason, it’s harder to accomplish anything. Yes, often we find ourselves engaging in thoughtless activity simply because someone in whom we have a great amount of respect for, asked that we do so. I would submit that keeping up with this course of action, never having a clue as to why your mother, for example, wanted you to bath five times a day would be difficult. Eventually, you’ll have an understanding of how other people behave and begin to question why they can get away with only one or two cleanings a day! You may even begin to resent your mother as you use up more and more body soap in your quest for absolute germ-free cleanliness. Anger and disappointment will soon give way to rage and disgust until you simply cease to comply. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Vision Series Tagged With: finding your purpose, purpose, vision, vision blog

Vision Creates and Sustains Motivation (Vision 4 of 6)

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 43 Comments

We’ve said a lot about vision and its importance to human beings and achieving their potential as individuals as well as within organizations. Nothing, however, is more important to people than motivation. It just so happens that when done well, vision represents the very soul of motivation without which, our efforts would be hollow and lifeless. Let’s take a look at motivation first.

Motivation is a complex labyrinth of stimuli then response. In some cases, the response itself is the very motivation to provide continuous stimulus and then yet again, an additional response. This cycle continues for most of our lives and is, in fact, the fundamental building block of all human behavior. When we accidentally touch something extremely hot we immediately snatch our hand away to protect ourselves. This is the classic stimulus-response example that behavioral scientists have studied for years. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Vision Series Tagged With: achieving your potential, brand management, Coffee Tea You and Me, motivation, networking, networking plan, personal development, productivity, social networking, sustaining motivation, vision, vision blog, VisionQuest90

Vision Clarifies Decision Making (Vision Part 3 of 6)

March 18, 2009 by Coach Powell 43 Comments

About decision-making

Decision making is the most critical cognitive skill that we all have. Our ability to reason and make informed conclusions help us decide how, if and when we are to act on anything. In fact, decision making by definition contains the ability for us to make purposeful selections from and amidst a set of alternatives. We have to constantly negotiate mental objects and concepts to arrive at our process of living. Our ability to do this and do it well affects us on every level; personally, within our relationships and as leaders of organizations. Without well-honed decision-making skills, there is no accurate planning or coordinating, no ability to control situations as we experience them. It’s like being adrift on a stormy sea with no sail or rudder. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Vision Series Tagged With: clarifying decision, Decision Making, fundemental truth, vbdm, vision, vision blog

Vision helps others to buy-in and creates true understanding (Vision Part 2 of 6)

March 18, 2009 by Dan Kolansky 50 Comments

Personally speaking, there is nothing worse than reaching for opportunities that don’t really exist or striving to work hard on strategies and concepts that have no real chance of ever being implemented. Nothing really happens when you don’t know where you are going. Actually, a lot happens. The vision of other people happens to you.

Finding your real vision can be extremely easy or painfully difficult. The choice is yours. Creating your own vision gives you the gift of inspired change. This gift is a continuous source of motivation and encouragement. You never have to worry about where you should aim your career or personal life. You’ll understand without a doubt where you are going and why you believe you should get there. Your vision is at once an effort of destiny that has to be found and simultaneously an exercise of creation that emerges only with real focus and practice. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Vision Series Tagged With: buy-in, creating understanding, vision, vision blog

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Explaining the Game!

It’s all about strategy!