Tag Archives: Epiphany

Happiness in Business

There is an analogy that I use a lot and that is the dinner party, and I like the dinner party because there are so many elements to a dinner party, there are so many things that happen – it’s such fertile ground get £300 Loan with Bad Credit.

Have you ever thought about what the ROI is for a dinner party, the return on investment? Because if you think about it, you put alot into it, you put your time of preparing it, you put in money for the food and the drinks. You put your emotional energy – the sweat equity working on the recipes, creating the food, you ask, “Is this going to work?” You put time into inviting your guests, you put time into preparing your house, or money into preparing your house, maybe you hire somebody to clean up, maybe you hire somebody to serve the food or maybe you hire somebody to prepare the food. But there’s a significant investment in one way or another when you have a dinner party https://www.routinewealth.com.

And then you execute the plan; people come over. And then the evening just unfolds and different things can happen, you know maybe the food gets burned, maybe the food is underdone, maybe the food doesn’t taste good, maybe the power goes out. There are so many different things that can happen in a dinner party that are unexpected. Maybe somebody spills wine all over the rug or all over themselves and they are very embarrassed, check citigraphics.

But the interesting thing is everything can go wrong in a dinner party, and you still have a very high ROI – return on investment – because your return on investment of a dinner party is what? It’s happiness –  simple happiness. We invest our time and energy and money into a dinner party to get a return on investment of happiness.

So the truth is everything can go wrong and we still have a very significant ROI. Maybe it goes wrong but we just laugh about it, we have a good time. The power goes out and the food’s halfway done so we call up the pizza parlor and we have a bunch of pizzas delivered and all these people dressed up really nice and we’re having pizza by candlelight and we’re playing charades and it seems like everything that can go wrong did go wrong and yet it still works out to be the greatest evening of our life and if we tried vehemently, we could never reproduce that.

On the other side, everything can go right. Guests can show up on time, they can have great food, and yet something is just missing and we have a very low ROI. Something happens where it just doesn’t feel like people really connected and we all just sort of sat there and ate and said our goodbyes at the end of the evening and it just didn’t click. And maybe you had 10 dinner parties the weeks before that were awesome and this one just didn’t work out and try as you might you can’t figure out why, but okay you have another dinner party later and you’re unwilling to stop having guests over just because it didn’t work out once.

I think all these things are applicable in business. We make grand plans, we have visions, we know what we want and we push the button, we execute those plans and sometimes those plans work out great and we get a lot of business and sometimes those plans don’t work out very well at all and we don’t get a lot of business. And we tend to look at return on investment of how much money are we bringing in but we all know the truth that money doesn’t buy happiness. So maybe business is more like the dinner party, maybe regardless of our return on investment in terms of cold hard cash, we need to also look at our return on investment in terms of raw happiness. Now I’m not saying that I’m in marketing to make you happy and forget about money, I’m in marketing to help you earn more income; that’s my job, that’s why you hired me. And I also want to find ways to help you increase your level of enjoyment in your business as you’re earning more money.

A question I ask a lot, “Would that be valuable to you?” Would it be valuable if I could help you find greater levels of enjoyment in what you do while you’re earning more money? Because the truth is that’s what I like doing, that’s what I really enjoy doing. Now I found that the reason people aren’t happier in their business comes down to one specific thing; the level of risk that they’re taking personally. I’m not talking about risk of investing; I’m talking about the risks that they’re taking personally.

What are they doing that puts themselves out there in a way that they haven’t done before? How are they taking an emotional risk where they may appear foolish, may reveal certain intimate details about their life? Because what I’ve found is that happiness is about creating greater connections. Human beings are happier when we are increasing a higher level of involvement with other human beings. That tends to be the tipping point of happiness: what’s my involvement with other people?

Now a low level of involvement and a higher level of income produces a lower level of happiness. A higher level of involvement and static income increases happiness. Now a higher level of involvement and a lower level of income produces lower happiness because it’s hard to feel involved with other people when we’re concerned about just day-to-day living – “Am I going to be able to keep the lights on?” But a higher level of involvement with other people and a higher level of income produces more happiness.

So how do we increase your level of involvement and your level of income? Well part of that is in branding. Here’s what branding is really about: “Branding” is a word that’s thrown around a lot, “My brand,” “Is this consistent with my brand?” A business without a brand is like a person without a personality.

Your company’s brand is essentially your personality stamped on top of your company. The person you are, the things that you believe in, the things that you enjoy, the things that make you, you, when attached properly to your business create your brand. Think about it, Steve Jobs and Apple Computers. We all know who Steve Jobs was when we walk into an Apple Store. It’s style, it’s personality, it’s technology, it’s friendliness and connection. You walk into an Apple Store, you’re greeted but you’re also in this world of high technology and it’s also a world that’s very well organized an Apple store never feels cluttered. They make excellent use of empty space, it’s very welcoming. So technology, order, style; these were things that were very important to Steve Jobs and they have been rubber stamped on top of his business.

So when you go to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, it’s beautiful, it’s clean, it’s fun, it’s wholesome, it’s welcoming, it makes you feel good. It’s what Walt Disney was all about, bringing greater enjoyment to families, making kids happier. The Disney Corporation rubber stamped Walt Disney’s personality on top of their multi-billion corporation.

Now the truth is you don’t have to have a lot of money to brand your business, all you have to do is have a willingness to look deep inside and be clear about what it is that you’re all about in your company. The reason you got into business in the first place, that’s your brand. Often times we can’t see that, we can’t see the forest for the trees. We don’t know what that thing is, partially because we’ve been in business for so long and we’ve just sort of forgotten that initial spark that said, “I’ve got to do this!” And it’s hard to remember what that is, to really get back to it.

And the other reason is “Physician heal thyself” – we need a hand, we need help, we need somebody to hold up a mirror to us and say, “Oh, I hear what you’re saying about your business, let me feed that back to you, I think this is what you’re all about. Is that right?” “Oh yeah, that is right.” That’s your brand.

So let me bring this all the way back around. What we all want in life, in business, in ourselves, is greater happiness. The pathway to greater happiness is more connectivity with others. The pathway of more connectivity with others in business is a solid brand, a brand that’s like a beacon, a light; it brings your best customers to you. I say your best customers because when you brand your business successfully, you are attracting a certain type of people.

Disney isn’t looking for motorcycle gangs, Apple computers isn’t looking for people who are stodgy and narrow minded, those are not their best customers. Because their brands are so strong, they actually repel the people that are not best suited to work with them. By repelling the people that are not best suited to work with them, they have a lower incident of having to deal with the people that they don’t want to deal with and a higher incident of dealing with people that they want to deal with and thereby that creates greater personal connectivity, increases happiness.

By bringing your best customers to you, through branding, through marketing, through your materials, through your website, through search engine optimization, through mailers and email blasts and social media; by bringing your best customers to you, the people who are best suited to work with you, increases your level of connectivity and increases what? Your happiness.

My name is Dan Gordon, my company is The Big Time Group, I do marketing for your business, and I make you happier.

The Give and Take of Marketing

As Americans we are takers. And that’s not a statement of condemnation, it just is. And it’s not really our fault because we got started on a taking trajectory. It’s actually simple physics. Objects in rest and motion will continue in that direction until enacted upon by an outside force. So when this country started, we came here and saw Indians, and we took their land and we built see. And then when the railroad came through and we realized that we needed to go through where there were communities, we took those communities. And when we needed more people to help us build the country, we took people from other countries and used them. Even when we went to the moon, we did not declare it a victory for our planet, we called it ours. So we took the moon. We haven’t really done anything with it or don’t know if we will do anything with it, but just so everybody knows, it’s ours.

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We’ve built an entire society on taking and we are incentivized to take because the largest takers get the highest levels of status in our culture, so we are incentivized to take. Now, that’s not to say that we don’t give; we have. In fact, in the last hundred years, we figured out that giving is an important part of taking, and there are a lot of givers. It’s just that our giving hasn’t quite caught up with our taking yet. If we were to graph out taking and giving, clearly taking would still be way, way higher than the amount of giving that we do. And it’s ironic because endemic in our language is the term “give and take,” how come it’s not “take and give?” That seems to be our path, because most of the time we don’t give back until we take.

Andrew Carnegie did not build Carnegie Hall until he had taken quite a bit. The Gates Foundation is a giver because of all the taking that they did. Well, of course, naturally you have to take first because if you don’t take something then you have nothing to give, right? Maybe not. It’s sort of like the guy who keeps dating the same type of girl over and over and over again and complains why he can’t find love. Perhaps we’ve gotten so used to taking and then giving that that’s the way that we only see it.

In my process in working with companies and branding them, the first thing that I do is help them unlock the way that they have looked at their company. In other words, I don’t ask what you do for a living; I ask, what is your company all about?  –  which is a  much more complicated question. For instance, if I would ask a flower shop owner, “What is your company all about?” his first answer is, “We sell flowers.” “But, no, no, no, that’s what your company does. What is your company all about?” And after working with him, we might uncover something like the death of a friend’s mother when he was a little boy and watching the flowers being delivered to the home and bringing some level of joy and color to a very, very dark place, and perhaps it got inside of him that, “Oh, flowers have this magical property to bring color to someone’s world.”

And so his brand isn’t really about selling flowers, his brand is about bringing color to the world – which is very, very different than selling flowers. And it helps him on his business trajectory, because if his best client is somebody who wants to bring color to the world, then that really changes the way that he thinks about his company. In other words, he stops going after the type of customer like the guy who forgot his wife’s anniversary and in the last second buys a dozen roses. That’s not really bringing color to someone’s world, that’s covering your ass.

So, with that brand model, he has put himself on a trajectory of giving before taking. In other words, when a potential customer comes in, say, a wedding, he would have a program of figuring out the best flowers for them to use, create a list and create the systems for how the flowers would be set up. He would then give that customer that piece of paper that they could go online, they could go to another flower shop or they could work with him. But it’s a tremendous amount of faith to give before he takes, to offer value way before the sale.

And that’s my style of marketing, and that’s what I want to bring to the world – giving before taking. When I sit down with a potential client, I tell them that, “You will walk away with at least five new ideas about how to promote your company, so even if we never work together you’ve had value from our interaction.” I give before I take.

And I’m not the only one doing this. There’s a company called The Panera Bread Corporation, a sandwich and bakery shop that started in St. Louis, Missouri that came up with a great idea: pay what you feel the meal is worth. Now, they haven’t quite worked it out where you can eat the food first and then pay before you leave, but they’re getting close to giving before taking, because it’s the same mindset. It’s a level of faith. It’s a belief that we will be okay by releasing the control of our taking. What we haven’t learned in over 200 years is faith; faith that if we give first we will be given back to, that we don’t have to take, that giving comes naturally after someone is given to.

So I’m pushing a new model. Instead of give and take, it’s give and give back, a give-and-give-back model. Now, how would a give-and-give-back model work? Certainly, if you pulled up to an Exxon Mobil station, what are they going to say? “Go ahead and fill up your tank, drive around for a while, then come back and let us know what you feel the value of our tankful of gas was.” A pretty good idea from my perspective, but how much luck do you think I’m going to have selling that to the oil companies? In fact, the entire oil business is founded on the principle of taking. Certainly, there’s not a lot they can give back once they pull all the fossil fuel out of the ground. In fact, there’s probably nothing left to give back.

So again, I don’t blame them. I don’t think it’s their fault. It’s trajectory. It’s physics. It’s a company; it’s an industry that was based on the concept of taking, so they’re probably going to be one of the last ones to the party. Instead, I focus my efforts on companies who can weave in the giving-before-taking model into their business system a lot easier.

Now, let me tell you how I know this works. For 15 years, I’ve been in the personal development world, and for a number of years I flew around the country teaching personal growth courses, these very intense weekends of helping people recognize the things they do in their lives that keep them from the things that they want. In other words, we all have wants and hopes and dreams, and the reason that we don’t pursue that is largely based on the blocks that we create, the belief systems that we create. And most of those belief systems could be boiled down to taking before giving.

 

There are a lot of people that came through that course who were struggling in their relationships, and overall what I found the struggles were about where they didn’t feel fulfilled. Their partner in essence wasn’t giving them what they wanted. And it’s what we all want, love on our own terms. But what they didn’t recognize was it was okay to give their partner what they wanted, and the immediate response was, “What about me?”

For instance, let’s say you are married and your husband says that he wants dinner on the table the moment he comes home from work your first reaction may be “What about my feelings? What about my needs? What about the things I’m doing?” And my response to you would be, “Well, have you tried giving him what he wants?” And your reaction may be, “No, of course not, because if I give him dinner the moment he comes home, what’s the next thing he’s going to want and the next thing he’s going to want and the next thing he’s going to want? And I’ll never get my needs filled.” I’d say, “Wait, all he asked for was dinner. Have you tried that?” And the response I  usually get is, “No, no, no, Dan, you don’t understand. This guy’s a taker. He’ll just keep taking.”

So after working with them,  we get them to begrudgingly agree to doing the thing that their partner wants just as an experiment, just to see what happens, and 9 times out of 10 I’d hear back from them, “Things are so great. All he wanted was dinner on the table when he got home from work. Our relationship is a lot better now. I’m getting so much of what I wanted. Wow! Giving gets you what you want.”

So it’s true at the bottom, base, foundation of our culture, our relationships, when we give, we get. When we give things that other people want, they give us back something. So if it’s true with the foundation of our culture, then it’s got to be true as we go up the ladder, as those relationships turn into businesses, and then companies and corporations. If it works at the foundation level, then it’s got to work at the upper levels too.

So when I work with companies, I work on the principle of giving. What can you give that will create that positive psychic energy that will make your customers want to give back? And there’s a lot of pushback with this because just like the people in the relationships, “Wait, wait, wait, if I give to my customers, they’re just going to take and take and take and I’ll never have something for me.” Have you tried? “No, you don’t understand. We’re operating on a razor-thin budget. If I don’t do it this way, I’ll never have anything.” “Have you tried?” “Well, no, but…” “Would you try?” “Okay.”

You see, when I start working with a new client, I have what I call my branding session, which is basically my personal development technology applied to business. It’s a very powerful session, usually three or four hours, where 9 times out of 10,  the person I’m working with ends up bursting into tears, because I help them find something inside of them, that spark, that thing that got them into business in the first place.

And at the base of it all, at the bottom, when I ask them what their business is really all about, the answer always boils down to the same thing. “I want to help people.” Whether it’s CPAs or flower shops or tire stores or e-commerce companies, they want to help people. For more info contact MaidThis here. They got into the business because they found that it would be the easiest conduit to being in service to others.

And I think that’s endemic in our DNA, because we are a social species, we have to be connected to others. We have to or we die. We have to have connections, and it is endemic in that to be in service to others. We just get lost along the way.

See, I believe that business is the best place for us to learn about ourselves, because the things that we won’t do for ourselves we will do in business. Why? Because there’s a paycheck at the end of it. I would fly into cities and teach this course and come back a year later, and the people I had talked with would still be struggling with the same things. However, I do the same work with people in their business and they’re much more willing to take risks, to try things, to do things differently, because there’s a paycheck at the end of it. I have no qualms about that. It’s the ultimate piece of cheese in the rat maze.

So, to wrap this all up, if we are a species that wants to give, and if we find greater happiness in relationships through giving, then certainly we can find greater profits in our business by giving before we take and the model of giving can be so easy; just understand what you do and give part of that away. The easiest, the best way, the first way is by giving away knowledge, the thing that you know, because the thing that you know that’s so obvious to you is complete new technology to the people who first start doing business with your company. So by giving away a part of your knowledge, you’re creating a tremendous amount of positive click this site.

And yes, some people are going to take that knowledge and find the lowest price in which to apply that knowledge, but you will find, more and more, the more giving that you do, the more goodwill you create, that creates a vortex of compassion and a certain sense about your business that will draw your customers to you, that in giving, the giveback will be monumental.

A practice of empathy

Don’t try to solve your problems. Instead, know that your problems are pointing to the bigger things that stopping you from being who you truly are. Focusing on your problems is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Your problems are the misdirection you put in front of you to avoid looking at your deeper truths. I want to offer you a way OUT of your problems.

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Moving away from your problems means showing up very differently in your life.

You stop looking for the resolutions. Instead, ask yourself these questions:

  • What are my problems making me believe about myself?
  • What can I trace those beliefs back to?
  • How do I usually react when you have these beliefs?
  • How do I pressure other people to change when I have these beliefs?

You may be tempted to believe that your problems are caused by other people. They aren’t. When you are activated by something that someone has done or said, instead of being reactionary, stop. Be curious about where they are struggling. This curiosity will distract you from being hijacked by your own wants needs and frustrations. Focus on what they need instead of what you want from them. It doesn’t mean you have to give it to them. It only means that you will have a greater knowledge about their state of mind as it pertains to them and not you.

This is a practice of empathy. In this practice, look for opportunities to make personal connections with complete strangers. Ask someone how they are doing. If they say “okay” or “good,” respond with, “Only okay? Only good? What is something great that’s happening in your life right now?”

Look at the people around you, the people in your life, the people at the next table at a restaurant. Ask yourself, what  they are struggling with. Ask yourself, what is the belief they are carrying about themselves? By maintaining this practice of empathy, you will distract yourself from the pain that comes with the belief that other people are the cause of your upsets in life. You will be released from the illusion that others have power over your peace of mind.

Don Draper and the Dark Corridor

If you’re in business and you’re not a fan of the show Mad Men you really should be. I suggest a good ol’ Netflix binge watch. Anyway, for the purpose of the following it doesn’t matter if you watched the show or not.

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Having worked with a whole lot of people going through a whole lot of crises (both business and personal), there were some key elements of the last Mad Men episode that hit a perfect note of the struggles that bold men face. Don finally came to his “moment” sitting on a rickety wooden stool at a payphone, trapped at a personal development retreat. By the way, and as an aside, having been a facilitator in the personal development world for many years, they did a great job of subtly lampooning the entire movement with full-of-themselves facilitators asking the do-nothing question “how does that make you feel” over and over again. Classic.

Don’s “moment” gave him the exact thing he needed and yet the exact thing he had been avoiding, seemingly, all of his life. Don needed to get lost and he had been needing to get lost for the entire run of the show however, like with all great men, the act of getting lost is far too terrifying a thing to do willingly. In my work, I refer to it as stepping into the “Dark Corridor.” The Dark Corridor exists in the place between where people are in their lives and where they want to be. The truth is that we all want a little more than what we have. That’s not a bad thing, it’s the human condition to grow and develop. We want to be happier, more fulfilled, feel more loved, and achieve greater success. How do we get there? Well, that’s the bad news. Between us and all that is the Dark Corridor; a place of monumental fear and uncertainty. When we have a desire to pursue greatness in our lives, we do things like go into business for ourselves, we get married, we move to a new city or country, etc. The idea of it all seems terrific. We are filled with the burst of excitement and adrenaline that makes us feel like we’re in a 1980’s dance movie. You know it, it’s the part where the kids have just one day to practice for the big show and they all yell, “We can do it!” This leads to a montage of them gleefully practicing their cool dance moves, which takes place over a period of several hours but is compressed into just a minute or two with a snappy pop song behind it. (Don’t worry, I’ll be getting back to Don in just a second and this will all fit together when I do.) Unfortunately for us, there are no montages in life. We can’t skip the drudgery or the fear part of the experience with quick cuts, low camera angles and snappy music. Instead, we have to experience all the crap and drudgery that shows up right after our orgasmic “We can do it!” moment. Instead of the montage, we are left with the very empty feeling of, “Wait a second now. CAN I do it?”

It is in that moment that we take a step into the Dark Corridor. Here, we reach out into the darkness, fumbling, trying to find a wall to guide us through. Seemingly there are none. It’s terrifying. Nothing we have done before in our lives before has prepared us for what we are experiencing right now. There are no points of reference. We feel ill equipped to deal with the new feelings all this brings up. We stand completely alone. Everything in our being tells us to go back the way we came. We want to back out of it because this lost and empty feeling seems too hard to bear. We had no idea that doing this big thing would be so unbelievably soul crushing. So we create a mountain of reasons why we can’t continue, all very good reasons by the way, and summarily step back out the way we came. Back to the same job, the same unsatisfying (or no) relationship, the same address, the same everything. But at least we feel safe and safety becomes more important than doing that great thing we were going to do. Many people stay here, choosing to live a rather small life.

Unless we don’t do that. Unless we continue walking deeper into our Dark Corridor. Unless we make friends with unparalleled fear and uncertainty and suffer all the pain that Don Draper felt when (see, I told you we’d be back to Don) he confessed his sins to Peggy. Because in the middle of the Dark Corridor is the thing we want to see the very least. It’s a mirror. It shows us every doubt and every insecurity that we have ever had about ourselves. More than that, it shows us the one doubt that we have been hiding the most from us and everyone else. It’s the one thing from which we have been running away all of our lives. For Don, he had been using booze, women, sex, work and a total immersion into the world of advertising to avoid that one thing that he feared the most. This is what made the last episode such a perfect conclusion to the Don Draper character study. What Don saw in his mirror is the very thing that all men of greatness fear the most. “I am a fraud.”

For Don it was especially perfect because, in truth, he was a fraud. He took another man’s name, he invented a back-story for himself, he denied his past and the squalor from which he came. Don was a made up person and the last person he wanted to tell that to was himself. Yet he did. By telling Peggy Olsen, Mad Men’s moral compass, he was in fact outing himself to himself. Standing naked in the middle of the Dark Corridor, facing his mirror of truth, Don looked into the abyss of his soul. It’s a terrifying place (trust me on this one) where few men are willing to go.

Yet, without realizing it, Don set the stage for himself so beautifully to go into that dark place. He was sure that he was setting off on his cross-country journey in pursuit of some waitress. In fact, Don was stepping backwards into the corridor. Along the way he just got more and more lost, again exactly what he needed. Don got beaten up, swindled and falsely accused. He barred his soul to men  too wrapped up in their own traumas to really hear him. He got more lost when he gave away his car and reduced his life to a small bag of stuff and an ever-dwindling envelope of money. By the time he ended up at the hippy retreat, Don was fully in it. He just didn’t know it yet.

Don’s fraud declaration to Peggy was perhaps his most courageous act in the entire run of the series. While it was excessively painful for him, it was also his ultimate act of self-heeling. Looking look into that mirror, seeing the dark truth of himself and experiencing the emptiness within, there began a quieting of his soul. Don, lost and afraid, went staggering into yet another “and how does that make you feel” seminar. There he confronted his mirrored self. A nothing-man, weak and small, who thought of himself as unimportant and bereft of value in the world. Don stepped forward and embraced the man, but really he was embracing the part of himself that he had been running away from, seemingly his entire life.

Yes, Don, was a fraud in many, many places in his life. However, the one respect in which he was not a fraud was in his genius of the human condition. Don understood how to reach into people’s hearts. Ironic, but true. Don, so lost and disconnected from his own loving self, was able to reach out to the loving selves of the whole world and sell them all canned corn and hairspray. Don’s heart was, in fact, so big that selling stuff to people was the only way he could reach out emotionally and yet still be safe from forming the entanglements that cause heartbreak.

All that came crashing down for him, and thankfully so. Don’s breakdown became Don’s breakthrough. Having traversed his Dark Corridor, Don stepped tepidly out into the light of a new place. Here, he was able hold himself as a fraud and a genius in equal measures; being attached to neither one. Don experienced the freedom that all great men who have made this journey have experience. Certainly Gandhi, Dr. King, Mandela, and all the other leaders and visionaries we admire, at one point on their path, must have had the Don Draper moment. They must have all looked into their mirror and declared themselves as frauds. It is what great people do in order to get past themselves, their own wounds and buried trauma, to move forward toward the business of serving the world.

Don was now able to close his eyes in meditation and look deep within, no longer afraid of what he might find there. What did he find? Apparently, he found a desire to teach the world to sing…in perfect harmony.