better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Welcome To Last Year

3 January 2012

The world is alive with the smell of a freshly minted year and the cackle of a million people sharing resolutions and promising to do all the things they failed at last year! But what is gong to be so different for us this year? What are we really going  change?

Instead of looking forwards it can pay handsomely to look back and reflect on what got in the way of our success last year, or what we did to make things happen for us. Change is based on learning from the past and the application of good decisions …and so we can all pause the headlong rush into 2012 and ask ourselves:

•  What 3 things did I really learn from last year?

Once we have some new learning to inform our thinking, then, and only then, can we plan for the current year and decide what to drop, what to change and what to start. And if all we do is tweak a bit here and nudge a bit there, then nothing is really going to change, is it?

So, welcome to last year! What did you learn? How can you apply it for a better 2012?

For me, I learned that to get a radio show I needed to swallow my competitiveness and invite a co-host in the space. And boy, was that ever a smart move …Julie Bishop is just the best person to work with and I’m so glad we found each other.

Tags: 2012, thinking

Welcome to 2012

2 January 2011

Well hello again and I hope that Crow did a good job of keeping my seat warm. He grumbles about getting a sore beak whenever I ask him to write the blog, but he likes it really and makes me wrestle the keyboard off him in the end. Birds eh!? They’re like children, except without the hopeful possibility that one day they will be fully house trained…

…But don’t tell him I said that, or he will get embarrassed.

So onwards!

The title up there isn’t a mis-print and here’s why:

Instead of looking forwards to 2011, we’re going to zoom ahead a whole 12 months and look back at our success and enjoy that feeling of having won through. It was easier than we thought too. Here we go…

Sit back and imagine it’s now January 2012 and that 2011 was a really successful year for us. Perhaps we found a great job, won lots of new customers, wooed the love of our life, or passed a tricky exam? We faced up to a challenge and we succeeded.

Now what was your challenge for 2011 and what was one thing that you did really well to make that success happen?

What did you have to do differently, or let go of, or bring into your world to make a big difference and act as a catalyst for success?

My challenge for 2011 was to find four new customers for the Outplacement side of Primary People. What I had to change was keeping this separate from my ILM Coaching Qualification so that people who were looking for work were able get a formal qualification at the same time. (This is a great way to build a strong CV and build confidence at interviews). And what I did was told people that they could have this as a package.

And then what I did was to find a finance mechanism which meant that people could get the skills they needed now, without having to spend their redundancy money, or savings, in one big gulp. This meant they could get round the Catch-22 of needing support to get a job and of not being able to afford it until they had a job. Been there! Got that t-shirt!

So that’s three things I did differently and I secured four new customers and laid the foundations for a great year.

I liked 2011, it went well.

What did you do to make it a success for you?

Tags: 2011, 2012, finance, ILM