In owning your own business there are many things that you have to learn about.  In fact, to have a successful business you must continually be learning to keep abreast of the change that is required for business success.

All this sounds good and it is.  The problem comes when you keep learning about a change you know you need to make yet you keep putting it off.  This is procrastination. You put if off because you feel if you learn a little bit more then you will be ready to change.  Where does a little bit more end?

I have watched small business owners spend time, the one commodity they can’t replace, getting educated to a much greater extent than is necessary.  What’s even worse, I have watched them spend time learning about something and then not applying what they have learned.

This can happen to all of us.  Yet, when it happens too often, it steals time and energy that could be directed toward small business growth.  What’s going on?

In most instances, you are insecure about making a wrong decision.  And, you apply the same process to the small decisions that need to be made quickly as you do to the big ones that you will make more slowly.

In owning your own business you must be able to make the small decisions quickly.  Learning and education are a security blanket that you use to cover your self on a decision.  Yet, when you leave that blanket on too long, it will end up keeping you from making the decisions to make your small business successful.

Have you ever spent a great deal of time learning about something, only in the end, to not apply it and have very little to show for it?  If you are truly trying to move forward in your business, then the answer will be yes.  That’s the good news!

Education for many is a solution to a problem or a challenge in growing small business.  Yet, small business growth is not so much about what you learn as it is about applying what you have learned.  And, since education takes time it is critical for you to be learning things that you are going to apply.

The bad news: If you aren’t learning things that you will apply, then you are actually hurting yourself.

Why?  Since education takes time, and time is finite, education that is not on purpose causes you to procrastinate and keeps you from doing things that would benefit your business.

Educated procrastination is not a successful performance strategy.  It eats up time and can lead to failure.  Growing small business is about having education that is on purpose.  If your education is not on purpose you will end up with “too much of nothing.”

When you enter into self-employment and the world of small business you are confronted with numerous challenges.  For the sake of simplicity I will break those challenges down into two areas.

1.  The Hard Skills.  These are the tasks you perform to have your small business grow and prosper.  These could range from accounting to executing a marketing plan.  And you can find many experts to assist you.

2.  The Soft Skills.  These have to do with people.  More importantly, these have to do with how you see your relationships.  How you see your relationships will determine how you relate to people.

Sadly, with such a great emphasis on the hard skills, the soft skills are very often ignored.  Yet, to have small business growth and a successful small business, the soft skills are the most important.

Ask yourself the following question.  How am I motivated to see people?

• Are they human doings where I just focus on their accomplishments?  Am I primarily concerned about how they will benefit me and my business?
• Are they human beings where I focus on who they are and acknowledge them for the good their presence brings to my business?

In working with hundreds of business owners over the years, I have seen the greatest strides in growing  small business take place when the owner focuses on the human being as well as what that person can do.

Owning your own business is a huge challenge.  And, as you grow, the biggest challenge, the one that can bring you success you never imagined, or failure that you never wanted to face, is how you are motivated to relate to people.

Get that balance in your motivation between what people do for you and appreciating them for who they are.  A good first step to change your motivation to appreciate people for who they are is to practice liking people.

You practice liking people by being a “good finder”. Find the good in others and focus on it.  More importantly, let them know about it.  When you give out this type of acknowledgement in slices, it comes back in loaves.

After all, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

One of the biggest obstacles to growing your small business is motivation.  How do you harness it to work for you?  How do you channel it to have a successful small business? It may sound like an easy question with an easy answer. 

Think about it.  If you knew how to harness or channel your motivations then you would currently have the business and life you want.  In some earlier posts I have brought up a couple of important points about motivation. 

1.  Motivation alone is not enough to insure your success

2.  You must be very clear on what you are motivated to do and not motivated to do. And, you must make sure that what you are not motivated to do gets covered to insure the success and growth of your small business. 

When your motivation is taking you down the wrong path and you are hurtling toward crossing the wrong finish line you don’t need more motivation to turn you around. 

You need more education.  You must take time out to reflect and evaluate you and your business.   And, when you do you must get clear or educate yourself about you and your business and ultimately what you are going to do about it. 

No one likes crossing the wrong finish line.  Crossing the wrong finish line is not about small business growth.  It is about small business failure. 

Take your motivation and combine it with education to turn yourself around and take you and your business to greater growth and success.

Over the years in working with business owners and entrepreneurs I have found one of the biggest obstacles to small business growth and having a successful small business is being absolutely clear about two things. 

1.  You must understand and know what you are motivated to do.

2.  You must understand and know what you are motivated not to do.

You may say, this seems pretty obvious.  If you are struggling in your business, either with cash flow, personnel, the job you have created for yourself or one of many other areas then I can assure you that it will be worth your time to understand the two points listed above. 

Take a sheet of paper.  Draw a line down the middle.  On the left side list all the things you are motivated to do.  These are the things where you naturally go and welcome doing them.  Don’t spend a great deal of time in thought.  Just let it flow. 

Now, on the right side of the paper list all the things you are motivated not to do.  On this side you will list the things that you do but really don’t enjoy doing as well as things that need to be investigated or done but haven’t. 

Armed with this information you can now start building your business and life from what I call an “honest foundation”.  In particular address the things you are not motivated to do.  To have small business growth and your small business successful these must be addressed. 

In addressing them come up with systems that either minimize your involvement or allow you to delegate.  When you take care of the things that you are not motivated to do it clears up more space for you to do the things you like to do. 

It gives you more time to spend on your strengths.  Spending more time on your strengths while having your weaknesses covered, gives you the time to have small business growth that is designed around you and your vision of what you want your business and life to look like.

In a couple of other posts I have gone over some of the components that can bring you success in growing your small business.

1. Minimize drift and get specific
2. Develop new disciplines to support change and embrace it for growth
3. You must develop and write down clear goals for the near future and for up to 10 years and beyond.

This section on small business success and growth looks at your mind.  Your mind is a muscle.  What are you feeding it?  Yes, we can look at the books or magazines we read.  Or, the TV shows we watch.

Yet, the most important thing for most people that feeds their minds is their associations with other people.  Good relationships are an important part of a successful small business.

And, this is the one area where many small businesses fall short.  You can start focusing too much on what people can do for you and not enough on who they are.

People love to be acknowledged for who they are.  There are three ways that you must look at people to have the good relationships to have the small business growth and success you desire.

1.  See them as “Human Doings”–acknowledge and appreciate “what” they accomplish

2.  See them as “Human Beings”–acknowledge and appreciate “who” they are

3.  Combine the two together to get an accurate picture to build the foundation for great relationships.

When you do that your relationships are more likely to nudge you in the right direction to the success you want.  Too often, we look only at accomplishments.  We look at what someone can do for us and see nothing more.

See the whole person and in return they are more likely to lift you up and help you to the small business growth and success you desire.

That’s right!  To be successful in growing your small business you must know that when everything else fails all you need to do is go back and read the directions.

You may be asking yourself, what does he mean?

Growing small business and small business growth don’t come with directions.

You are right in one sense.  Yes, you can read a small business ebook or books about small business success. Or you can have consultants, advisors or coaches to help you along.

But, without a clear set of directions you are 60% more likely to fail.  What are directions?  Directions are the goals you set.  Goals are not just for a week or a month.

Goals must also be long term.  They must give direction for the next year, five years out and ten years and beyond.

To have the success you desire you must have goals.  Your goals are the directions you will go back to read.  They will keep you on course.  They will help keep the vision of success alive.

Yet, without goals you will have a tendency to waste a lot of energy wandering and bumping into things.  This takes time, energy and causes pain.  It happens because you have no set of directions.

• Create your own set of directions.
• Create your own performance strategy for success.
• Write down your goals.

When you do these things you increase the odds of your success by 60%.  Those are the directions for small business growth and success.

Jim Rohn once said, “Motivation alone is not enough”. Think about it.  If motivation were all it took for you to have the business and life you want then you would have it.

When you start your business you are motivated.  As Michael Gerber says in the “E-Myth Revisited”, you have an entrepreneurial seizure.  You are motivated to start your business.  You have a successful vision of the future.

Yet, here you are six months or six years down the road and somehow your motivation has not turned into the reality of what you envisioned.  For many who are self-employed, just the opposite has happened.

In fact your motivation has led you to create a job for yourself that you don’t like and/or a business that has put you in bondage.  You may be prosperous but somehow the pieces of the puzzle aren’t fitting together.

What can turn this around? To finish the Jim Rohn quotation, “Motivation alone is not enough.  If you have an idiot and motivate him, you have a motivated idiot.”  The point is that all of us have our idiotic tendencies and you must identify yours.  Here are three critical points.

• Growing small business is about growing you.  If you don’t grow neither will your business.
• Without taking action, new action, nothing will change.
• Is it going to make any more sense tomorrow than it does today to start heading in the direction that will give you the business and life you want?

Be brutally honest with yourself. Get the input of others to give you a clear picture of what you must do to grow your business and your life.

Take the action and you will cure the fear that is holding you back.  When you do your motivation will take you in the direction of greater success in your business and life.

Are you an accident prone business owner?  If you are then you are traveling a rough road for yourself and your business.  Accidents are those things that take away our energy, focus and ability to complete the things that must be completed to be successful.  They can kill small business growth.

Accidents are the distractions, that if not avoided, can lead you to failure. Now, we can’t eliminate accidents but we can certainly minimize them.  When we do, we increase our odds of success.

Consider this:

1.  Self-employment and growing small business is a great challenge.

2.  To have successful small business growth you must develop new skills and new thinking.

This is continous process.

The key to avoiding or minimizing accidents and increasing your odds of success depends on your ability to develop new disciplines.  If you have a way of thinking or doing things that is not bringing you the results you want you must change.

The only way to change and move to success is to develop new disciplines.

What is a discipline?

A discipline is the bridge between a thought and an action.  When you put a thought for improvement together with the action to improve then you have a new discipline.

Start with some small disciplines and work up to the bigger ones.  After all, the small business life is going to throw you some pretty big challenges.  If you haven’t mastered the small ones then you don’t have much of a chance with the bigger ones.

Master the art of create new disciplines and you will have fewer accidents and greater success.

How we address failure will determine our success.  The pain of failure is great.  It may keep us up at night and ruin our relationships and hurt those we care about.   When confronted with failure, it is our opportunity to change and bring success into our business.

Small business growth is about embracing change.  It is an immutable law that you cannot grow without change.  Taken one step further if you don’t learn new ways of looking at things then you and your business will never change and probably not be successful.

Nobody wants to fail in business.  As a self-employed business owner your entrepreneurial instincts tell you in the beginning that you will succeed at the business you are creating.

Then after a short period of time, or it could be years you have to come face to face with the fact your business and your life is headed in the wrong direction.

Understand two things about failure:

1.  It is the accumulation of many small errors in judgement

2.  These errors are accumulated over a period of time.

Usually, failure usually is not one grand event.  It is the culmination of many things that lead to the signature event everyone remembers.  Failure is subtle.

Learn how to detect failure.  Correct the small errors as you go along by developing new disciplines.  A new discipline may be a different way of doing things or a better way of thinking.  Both of these demand that meaningful change must take place.

You have a choice when it comes to change.  You succeed when you embrace change.  You fail when you let change run over you.  Discipline yourself to embrace change and you will increase your odds of success.