Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The Sure Sign that Perfectionism Is Hurting You
Yesterday, I told you about a discussion I was in a couple of weeks ago about perfectionism. Many in that discussion saw themselves as perfectionists. And they saw their perfectionism as something that helped them get things done and done well.

As someone who has struggled all my life with the destructive aspects of perfectionism, I see a very dark side to it. That dark side is fear based.

I see it in myself and I see it in many others with whom I have worked. I see it used as an excuse for procrastination: "Oh, I can't let anyone see this until it's perfect." Or I see it used to justify inaction: "I just can't get this perfect, so I won't even try."

I've seen it affect self-worth: "If I don't get this perfect, people won't accept me." And this dark perfectionism is often the doorway into self-destructive behavior and even addiction: "I don't measure up. I can't measure up. I can't stand the pain of not measuring up. I need something to dull that pain."

Whether that dark side of perfectionism is limited merely to fear of trying something new or goes to the extreme of being the root of behavior that destroys lives, fear is the clearest sign that the kind of perfectionism you experiencing is destructive rather than constructive.

Fearful perfectionism, ironically, keeps you from getting results that come anywhere near perfection. It locks you into predetermined ideas of what the results should be. Those predetermined ideas prevent you from finding true excellence. They focus you so much on making everything turn out exactly the way you envisioned it at first that you overlook opportunities that could lead to even better outcomes.

And those predetermined ideas are almost never attainable. They rely on everything turning out exactly as you originally envisioned, every step of the way. And anyone who has tackled any kind of project knows that nothing ever turns out exactly as planned in every detail. Adapting to what happens along the way is essential to any endeavor.

So what do you think? Have you seen this kind of destructive perfectionism in yourself? In others? What have you or others done to overcome it? I'd like to hear your insights on this.

Tomorrow, we'll look at being a perfectionist and still adapting to changing situations.

Jeff

Labels: mindset, perfectionism, successful business

Paving Materials for Your Success
I just finished watching a webinar in Jim Edwards' The Net Reporter site. I can't tell you the exact topic because members have a confidentiality agreement not to reveal the topics he covers.

Suffice it to say, though, that this topic was a very detailed breakdown of a very profitable process. He broke down all the steps brilliantly and in great detail. There's no way that anyone who followed those steps could avoid succeeding.

The webinar struck me as having a lot of "tough love" in it, though. Jim didn't sugar coat things. The process is brilliant, but it's not some "push a button and wait for money to fall in your lap" hype. It will take a lot of work.

Something struck me, though, as he laid out this process and the effort required in it. There are no shortcuts to excellence. There are no shortcuts to the kind of success that Jim has demonstrated is possible. The road to success is paved with hard work and determination, but those paving materials are something we all have available to us.
Jeff


P.S. If you've gotten tired of all the hypesters who sell you on pixie dust instead of real, honest answers on how to make your Internet business succeed, I know of no better place to look than at Jim's The Net Reporter training site. I'm proud to call Jim my mentor and consider his site the one Internet marketing tool or training that I absolutely would never give up, unless I was closing my business forever. I encourage you to check it out.

Labels: Jim Edwards, mindset, successful business, The Net Reporter

Customer Service - Not Sacrifice
I've talked a lot about getting inside the head of your customers as a starting point for selling to them. I've talked about the need to go to the extra mile to serve your customers. Many marketers refer to this as moving the "free line."

Moving the free line means that you give away items or information of such high perceived value that customers come to trust you as someone who is looking out for their welfare. There's a pitfall to that, though, that I want to make clear I'm not talking about.

Serving your customers should never go to the extreme of giving to the point where you can't continue your business. I've seen business owners who couldn't pay themselves a livable wage agonizing over whether to hire an out-of-work friend in order to help them through their rough times. I've seen business owners who gave away so much for free that they were going bankrupt.

I've straddled that line myself a lot. I grew up with it drilled into me that being a "good person" involved sacrificing what you wanted to give others what they want. A lot of other business owners have that same self-sacrificial mindset.

Just as running a business is no excuse to exploit customers for your own selfish ends, running a business is no excuse to self-destruct out of a feeling of obligation to give others value at your own expense.

A self-sacrificial approach to giving value to customers is destructive not only to you, but also to current and potential future customers. Business is not merely about getting. Neither is it about giving things up.

Business is rooted in sharing. Business is rooted in abundance. Business is rooted in one person sharing of their abundance in some solution in return for another person sharing of their abundance in money.

That means that rather than looking at what you can get out of your business or what you feel obligated to give, look at giving out of the abundance that you have. Grow the wealth you have in what you plan to offer. Build a sense of abundance in what you're giving.

No, it's not wealth or abundance as we normally think of it. It's not wealth or abundance in money. It is discovering what of value you have to offer and growing ever richer in that so that you have an abundance of that to offer -- in return for the money they offer you.

Then you'll feel neither a neediness that leads you to grasp for what others can give you, nor a poverty that leads you to sacrifice whatever you have for the sake of "serving your customers."
Jeff

Labels: mindset, successful business

Making Peace with Marketing Your Business
I would find it humorous that so many people want a business of their own, but don't want to let anyone know that they're in business. At least I would find it humorous if it wasn't so sad.

We want the freedom of running our own business, but we don't want to discipline ourselves to do the tasks that go into running a business (of which communicating to others what we offer them is a key part).

We want people to pay us for what we do for them, but we also want them to stroke our egos by feeling that they, without any effort on our part, specifically searched US out until they found us.

We recoil from marketing because the examples of bad, intrusive, manipulative marketing stick in our minds. We think that that bad marketing defines what we have to do in order to get business.

In reality, though, those examples of bad marketing are examples that are as unproductive in getting others' business as they were in getting our business. We fail to recognize good marketing when we see it because it feels so natural and appealing.

How can we recognize it and model our own marketing after it? Just learn from yourself. When you find yourself really being drawn to something or someone, stop and analyze what led you to feel attracted. What did they do to put you at ease? What did they do to tap into a need you were feeling and reassure you that they could fill that need?

Focus on the things that persuade you. Model those examples rather than recoiling from what turns you off and thinking that you have to model that. If you focus on modeling the good, persuasive examples of marketing you encounter, instead of modeling the bad, manipulative ones, you'll find yourself more at ease with the idea of marketing. And you'll find yourself doing marketing that is increasingly more effective -- and even enjoyable!
Jeff

Labels: marketing, successful business

Giving Away the Farm
I recently inventoried my site and all the content I have created over the past seven years and found a surprising wealth of content I could use for both free giveaways and paid products.

I've given away plenty of free giveaways. Where I could have done better is in thinking through how I was going to leverage them.

Any time you create a free giveaway, you should have in mind specifically how to leverage it. More and more as I create content nowadays, I look beyond the specific content I am creating to see how I can later repurpose it either for free giveaways or paid content of a larger scope.

I strive to keep in mind how to make things both benefit the recipient and reimburse me for my efforts -- an exchange of value.

When I first ventured online with my business nearly five years ago, I did so with determination to give away more things for free than anyone else did. I would offer businesses free hosting, free domain names, free website assessments, free this, free that, free everything.

I planned to offer everything for free with the hope that somewhere down the line, somehow, someone would pay me to do something for them. But I didn't really know what that something would be.

I figured, "Well, I have a well-rounded background in Internet marketing. I can do just about anything they need done." Aside from a huge flaw in trying to market too broadly, I still had no plan about how I would make my living off of giving away everything I had for free.

As it stands right now, I get plenty of comments from people who visit my site about how much valuable information I give away for free. That's fine. I'm glad to have that reputation.

Reputation, however, doesn't buy groceries. To stay in business, you need more than just having people think well of you.

It's better to have them think well of you because you provide them with something better than they can get for free. It's better even if they have to exchange some money at a rate that they still feel is a bargain for what they got in return.

It's easy to give things away and hope for the best. The true value of free giveaways is in planning out how you will leverage them.
Jeff

Labels: online business, successful business

My Jerry Maguire Moment
Last night, I had my Jerry Maguire moment.

You see, early in the movie "Jerry Maguire," Jerry, a successful sports agent, got up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, ideas racing through his head. He has just had an uncomfortable incident where a little kid forced him to look at the failed moral compass that marred his successful facade.

Mine wasn't so much a questioning of moral compass, but an ongoing angst over a business that never has developed the sure business compass I had hoped. A talk with one of my mastermind group members last night pointed out how, after a solid two weeks of what I felt was progress, I still hadn't addressed the key business needs I had set out to address.

I lay awake stewing over how to pull all the pieces together of a very disconnected business so that I could really serve those who I had set out to serve. Ideas raced through my head.

Suddenly, the pieces started falling together. I got up and started writing everything down. It all made sense. Some holes remain, but for the first time, I could see more than just a shadowy image of what I had always hoped my business to be.

Expect more on this soon.
Jeff

Labels: business system, start business, successful business

The Problem with Seeking Perfection
A couple of days ago, I mentioned the difference between knowing something from book knowledge as opposed to knowing something from actually doing it.

I touched on our tendency to hide behind our studies of whatever we want to excel in, hoping to wait until we know everything perfectly before we actually try it.

That's a big mistake. Learning from doing plays an important role in any attempt to learn. It helps us organize and retain what we learn.

A trick that police interrogators use when they suspect that someone is lying is to ask the person to tell them the sequence of events exactly as it happened. Then they ask the person to describe that same sequence, starting at the end and moving toward the beginning.

When someone lies about a sequence of events, they can keep their story straight because they've memorized the sequence they want to tell. But because they have no physical memory of the event, they have trouble telling it reverse order.

The same thing happens when we try to cram our heads full of theory that we hope to apply successfully later. If all we have is theory in our heads, attempts to piece everything together are elusive.

But if we have physical memories of actually attempting a task, our brains are able to organize the theories around tangible events that have imprinted themselves in our memories.

Even attempts that don't work out perfectly become points that help us organize and retain the knowledge. Mistakes ingrain themselves as dead ends avoid. Successes ingrain themselves as paths to follow.

Both mistakes and successes become magnets that organize and hold those thoughts and ideas into tangible knowledge -- knowing from experience.
Jeff

Labels: mindset, personal growth, successful business