I feel more in control of my work, less stressed, and freer! Woo hoo!

It’s all thanks to a fabulous blog that I subscribe to written by Sean D’Souza. Of all the newsletters and blogs that I subscribe to this is one I make a point of reading in full, every single time it appears in my inbox (I’ll give you the details in a moment).

Here is the concept:

All of us have long to do lists, lots of projects on the go and the potential for things to get out of control. If you’re anything like me sometimes I look at what needs to be done and go into some sort of paralysis where all that happens is I feel stressed, but nothing much is achieved and I sometimes even have trouble choosing what I should do next.

Thanks to Sean I now consider myself to be an air traffic controller. I might have 100 planes in the air but rather than trying to focus on all of them at once, I pay them each the attention that they need in order to stay in the air and not crash into each other.

And then one at a time I land them.

An air traffic controller can only land one plane at a time. And as they are landing that plane their full focus is to get it to the ground safely.

All of the things you are trying to achieve, the projects you are working on and the jobs on your to-do list are planes. They all need some attention while they are up in the air circling the control tower, each making some progress, and eventually they will need to land. This is when you will give them your undivided attention and finish the job.

One at a time.

At the beginning of every week I look at all of the things that I’m working on, and I decide which planes must absolutely be landed by Friday.

At the beginning of each day I decide which planes must land today.

And then I land them, while still making sure my other planes are doing OK while they wait their turn.

I have a fantastic sense of achievement, and so far the last fortnight has been more productive than usual. I am also sleeping better!

Have a read of Sean’s blog, you can get to it through this link which is his posting about air traffic control. http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/art-what-is-focus/

I encourage you also to go to his website, and read some of his articles. They are pure gold.

Sadly, we often end up 12 months later realising that all we have really done is repeated the previous year and maybe even the one before that.

I don’t know about you but I’d rather do one year once than feel like I am living in a year long version of the movie Groundhog Day.

Lots of big changes put in place all at once are often just too hard and overwhelming to keep going. With all the best intentions in the world, by February we are often back to doing what we’ve always done – and you know what that means: that our results will end up to be what we have always got.

Why not try something different this time and Invoke the Butterfly Effect!

Have you heard the saying

“ It has been said something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world“.

There are lots of different versions for this quote, and it has it’s roots in real science and something called chaos theory (if you want to know where it came from, read this  for much more detail google ‘Chaos Theory’ and you will be able to read to your heart’s content!).

The Butterfly Effect is a really great metaphor for the fact that we can create big results from even very small actions.

How can we make use of the Butterfly Effect in our party plan businesses?

Think about the last 12 months, and find one thing in your business that you would have liked to have done differently. Just one thing. It doesn’t have to be big. Maybe it’s attending a networking function once a month, or following up leads within 24 hours, or preparing all your host packs in advance at the beginning of the month, or taking one day off a fortnight, having lunch with a friend once a week, starting to using Twitter, and the list goes on ……

If you now make a plan and commit to just changing this one thing and nothing else, you will find the results to be remarkable. You will find that this one change will cause other changes – all for the better. That’s the Butterfly Effect. You don’t need to change everything over night.

Then, when you are ready,choose something else and change that.

By focusing on one thing at a time, and learning to look for the Butterfly Wings in your business, you will be constantly moving forward. And the results will not always be what you expect or what you can predict. But they will be fantastic. And you won’t be living in Groundhog Day!

I’d love to hear what is the one thing you’re going to change first, feel free to post a comment below, and for more tips to help your party plan business, visit our website and read our Quick Tips!

Happy Flapping!

What does your voicemail message say? Make sure it is short and to the point. People (especially your friends) do not want to hear a long message all about why they should join your business, or what the specials are for the month and most won’t stay on the line to the end of a long message. Even worse if someone is making a toll call and has to pay to listen to it!

“This is Anne, from The Party Plan Expert (pause) and the home of Anne, Steve, Alena and Alex. (pause) Please leave one of us a message. Thanks.”

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When I say learning, I mean actively, consciously learning and putting what you have learned into action. It means being aware of what’s happening around you and staying awake to it!

Things you learn might just need a tweak

 Learning is everywhere

Some of your learning will be formal and provided by your company and team leader – team meetings, company conferences, online workshops and webinars, newsletters etc.

Some of it you will need to go and hunt out, eg by attending seminars, online workshops, reading books, subscribing to blogs and forums, reading articles (and Quick Tips  ) etc. Some will be free, some won’t be – if you look around at the successful people in your company you will see they invest both time and money in their learning.

And some of it will be informal and possibly from surprising sources – a new consultant has a fantastic idea or suggestion you haven’t thought of, one of your children makes a wise observation, you over hear something on a bus, your favourite TV programme has something in the storyline that makes a difference to you, a friend posts an inspirational video on FaceBook, you experience a brainwave while doing the gardening – and the list goes on.

Don’t miss the gems

I use the same book when I go to seminars and workshops so I can keep everything in one place, and every now and then I sit down and go through my treasure trove of ideas.

I am always amazed at the great thoughts and ideas I have had in the past that I have forgotten or not acted on. Of course there are also ideas in there that at the time I wasn’t ready for, or couldn’t implement at the time.

Going through the notes again means that I get refreshed and can continually be moving onwards and upwards. It also gets me all excited again and gives me a real buzz!

The main thing is by being constantly on the lookout for learning opportunities, I have to stay awake - and that has to be a good thing!

Three weeks later there are still people with no water or sewage system, and things for them are very difficult.

It will take a long time for things to get back to normal for many people, although in some of the lucky parts of the city it already seems to be business as usual.

How do we as party planners get business back on track?

What do natural disasters mean for those who are involved in party plan businesses? At what point can you contact people about having a party? How long do you leave people alone for? Having been very fortunate not to have experienced this ever in my own career, I asked someone who has gone through a very similar scenario last year.

Larna Pittiglio is a successful party planner, and is a co-founder of Party Plan Portal, a place for Party Planners from all companies, in all countries to get together online and share and learn from each other.

Her comments are very helpful to anyone who finds themselves affected by something that is out of their control.

Over to Larna:

We had to deal with exactly this scenario last year with the Black Saturday fires…. It is a very real challenge for all businesses, not just party planners.

I think it’s important to call people to see if they are ok – with no reference to business.

It is a great idea to get your company on board with some kind of support. My company, The Chef’s Toolbox implemented a special offer giving a donation from every purchase of a certain product to the disaster charity.

As consultants, we also put a focus on fundraising events… so we organised events to fundraise for the cause… and at the same time it kept our businesses going in a time when bookings just fell out of the diary and team members stopped working.

The trick is to organise the events amongst people who have not been so badly affected financially so they are in a position to support those in need. You could also run an event for the victims… eg… if you are with a cosmetic company with skincare and body products, you could run a pamper night and invite them to come along and forget their troubles for a couple of hours and be pampered. This may not generate alot of business on the night, nor should that be the focus… but it is a ‘good’ thing to do and goes along way in building your presence in the community and the trust in you as a person for future business.

I also had to encourage my team to look elsewhere for a while for bookings ie… we had to be prepared to do a bit more travel to areas that were not affected by the bushfires…. and we made use of the tools we had to encourage the fundraising aspects of what we were offering to customers who were not effected financially by the crisis.

I have been through the bushfire areas recently and there are still people living in caravans whose homes have not yet been rebuilt. It took a good while for business to be restored to those areas in any form.

One thing I will say though, if consultants don’t do the customer care calls, get involved in the community and be present amongst their customers offering support… it will be very difficult for them to go back to those customers after several months when normal life is restored and expect to do business.

Thanks Larna!

If anyone has any other comments or ideas to add, we’d love to hear them!

In the party plan industry we often hear people talking about the importance of finding out our ‘Why’.

The reason is that finding it is crucial to our success.

Without a solid, real ‘Why’ we can’t set meaningful goals and we have less resolve to carry on when we hit a speed bump in our business.

So, what’s your Why? Is it to

• provide a better lifestyle for your family?
• help pay some bills?
• fund treats or trips away?
• enjoy more social contact?
• something else?

Any one of these reasons are perfectly valid, but they are not strong enough to keep us going in the tough times. We need a deeper reason, one that touches us emotionally.

We need to discover our REAL Why.

Here’s an activity tht might help you peel away some of the onion layers and get to a deeper reason. It’s called the 5 Whys.

First answer the question “Why am I in party plan?” Your answer may well be one of the ones listed above.

Then, look at your answer and ask yourself “why is that important?”

Look at your answer to that and ask again, “why is that important?”

Repeat this process until you have asked “why?” 5 times.

Each time you ask Why you should get a little deeper to something that comes close to your core, real reason for being in the business.

You might need to go through this process a few times to get it, but it’s worth it. Don’t be surprised if when you get there you do feel emotional – that means you have been successful in finding your real Why.

Whenever you hit those speed bumps (and you will), and you are wondering if it’s all worth it, check in with this real reason again and it will help you keep going.

And many of us get to repeat them all over again the following year.

Being on this merry go round is unnecessary, demoralising and just plain boring. Why does it happen though? We do really want these changes, don’t we?

Partly it’s because we have the wrong focus. We focus on the goal SETTING. We can SET goals until the cows come home – just by itself though, that isn’t going to (and often doesn’t) get us anywhere.

It’s time to do some goal GETTING!!

You know the saying If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got? Well let’s try something different for 2010.

December is the perfect time to start. Most people I know plan their year in January, once the year is already underway. I prefer to do it a little earlier.

Goal Getting must always start with reflection and the best time to reflect on the past year, is while it is still happening. Knowing and understanding what happened in the past is the best way to plan for a bright future.

So – make yourself a drink and take an hour out to reflect, dream and make an action plan for the 2010.

Start with 2009…

• How happy are you with how 2009 is finishing?
• Why or why not?
• What would you do differently if you could do it again?

… and then think about 2010.

Pretend that today’s date is 12 months from now. Describe your year in detail (this is a great thing to do with a friend or to write in your journal). Just try and let it all flow – write without thinking too hard or censoring anything. Answer these questions about 2010:

•  What did you do?
• Where did you go?
• What did you achieve?
• How did it feel?
• What obstacles came up and how did you deal with them? (use what you learned about your year in 2009 to help with this).
• How did you celebrate and reward yourself for the amazing things you achieved?

When I do this exercise in workshops the energy in the room just starts rising and rising. People get very excited and can truly put themselves in the place of having really ‘got’ their goals for the year. Try it and see what happens.

That’s a great start, but it’s not enough. We’ve been excited about goals before and many of them haven’t eventuated so let’s make sure we don’t repeat any mistakes already made. Mistakes are for learning from, so let’s make sure we do this.

Goals need to have 6 things in place before they can be effectively “got”.

1. You need to know why you want it  – and it’s probably not for the reasons you think.
2. You need to think about what you want.
3. You need an action plan.
4. You need to know what obstacles will come up and how you will deal with them.
5. You need to organise support.
6. You need to reward yourself.

Look out for my next posting which will help you find out really why you want to achieve the things you have imagined for yourself . You may be surprised…..

It’s easy to get stuck in this trap – we tell ourselves that we are the only one who knows our business and what to do, it’s faster to do it ourselves and we can’t afford to pay someone to work for us. We race from morning to night doing absolutely everything. We are Customer Service, Deliveries, Complaints, Accounts, Public Relations, Office Administration and everything in between. As well as that we are mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, friends and home makers.

Living and working like this is impossible for long term success and sanity.

Much of the work we do from the hamster wheel is non productive. It doesn’t generate any income. And in my case (and very possibly yours as well), nobody else can generate income in my business but me.

I am the only one who can write my books, deliver my workshops, speak at conferences, give coaching and mentoring, help new companies get started and develop new products. It simply doesn’t make sense for me to spend time doing tasks that generate no income and that other people could perfectly easily do – probably better than me.

In the beginning it was hard – I was counting every cent and not spending anything if I could help it. Apart from the fact that living on the hamster wheel was burning me out, the business just wasn’t growing because I wasn’t able to find enough time to work on income generating activities. And quite frankly, whenever I did find the time I was too exhausted to be able to be very useful!

Just as I was at my wit’s end, I found a marvellous book which made sense and helped me climb off my hamster wheel. My business has not looked back – and my home life is benefitting too. If you feel you are on a treadmill in business, you might like to run down to the local bookshop and pick it up:

Michael Gerber, The E Myth Revisited. Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.

You will read about Sarah and her pie shop and the immense pressure she was under day to day as she did everything herself in her business. You will read about how her business wasn’t growing and how it was driving her to exhaustion. And you will read how she learned to let go, delegate and how this helped her get on the track of huge business success.

No matter what your business is, there are tasks that you can delegate. By doing this you will free yourself up to do what you do best, which will bring in much more income than you are paying out in wages. Don’t wait until there is more money coming in to do this – if you wait you may never be in that situation at all! Pay people to do the tasks you don’t need to now, and make maximum use of the time you free up to grow your business.

By the way – tasks you can delegate include things like housework and ironing……

I have often found in the past that my lists have not been all that inspiring. They have been missing excitement and zing. Without emotion and passion the Law of Attraction has a hard job delivering for us, so this is a good thing to get right!

In the Law of Attraction Seminar I recently attended we were shown a really easy way to find out exactly what we want – beyond the usual things we can all write down off the top of our head.

It’s so simple too!

When we write a list of what we want, we can often make a reasonable list without too much problem. BUT what about trying to write a list of what we DON’T want? If you are anything like me (and the rest of the people in the seminar) we started writing and had to be told to stop!

The plan is not to dwell on what we are not wanting - but it turned out to be a fantastic way to find out what we all really DID want! Just find the opposite of what you don’t want! I instantly had a very comprehensive list of what I really do want – and there was real feeling, excitement, passion – and zing in it too.

Here’s an example (just a couple of things) – thinking about my own business

First, what I don’t want:

Only a few new Quick Tips subscribers every month.

To feel behind and always trying to catch up. To be working in the evenings.

Monthly turnover of less than $xxx

This translates easily into what I do want:

A thousand new Quick Tips subscribers every month.

To be on top of and ahead of all my work and to have my evenings free.

Monthly turnover of more than $xxx

Which then becomes an affirmation in the way we spoke about last posting:

“I am excited about having more than 1,000 new Quick Tips subscribers sign up every month. I love how if feels to be completely on top of all my work and to have my evenings free because I have done all I need to in the day. I am in the process of generating over $xxx turnover per month and in doing so am helping lots of people also be successful.”

I don’t know if this sets bells off for you, like it did for me – but I felt like shouting Eureka! All this stuff is starting to make really good sense! This statement is up on my vision board and I read it several times a day. I love it!

You can use this to change your vibe (energy you give out) anytime – just ask yourself “What do I want?”. So when you hear yourself think “I am so tired, I don’t feel good”, you are giving out and attracting low energy. THAT won’t get you anywhere fast - so change the energy!

Ask yourself “What do I want?” and if the answer is “I want to have more energy and to feel great” do the affirmation thing straight away - “I’m in the process of becoming  healthy, fit and energetic, and I love feeling great!”  It changes how you feel straight away.

It really works!!!!

PS – if you are involved in Party Plan or Direct Selling and haven’t signed up to Quick Tips yet – please do. Free tips fortnightly into your inbox. Spread the word – I love how it feels when I have 1,000 new subscribers every month!!! www.thepartyplanexpert.com

Take care, and cyber-see you in a fortnight!