envrionment

Finding a winning formula to business success.

There are many things that go into creating success in your business. One of them isn’t something most people give a lot of thought to. Especially when they start their business. It’s your working environment.

In the past, I’ve written about creating best practices for your business. You can read about those here. Your best practices are also key to running a successful business. Recently, I’ve had a few client sessions and conversations with business owners who feel they are stuck.

After asking them some key questions, what came to light was that their environment wasn’t supporting them in achieving their goals. It’s easy to do. You have your list of things you do for your business and your routines. As a result, you are so busy doing those things that you fail to notice how the disorganization, (ahem, the mess) creeps in. Sooner or later things start to fall through the cracks. And at the same time, things aren’t happening as you planned. Surprisingly, you think “what is going on here”.

Look around at your environment.

Take a moment, yes right now. I’ll wait. Look up and look around. What do you see? Do you see a bunch of papers all over the place, are things on the floor (yes, I know that happens), and what about that floor? Does it need a good vacuum? What about your computer desktop and even the apps on your phone? Do you have your electronic files filed neatly so that you can easily find them?

Don’t beat yourself up here. It’s important to look at things as they are right now. Just look around and notice. That’s the first step to setting yourself up to have a winning environment.

My clients often tell me they need to work on their time management. And sometimes that is the case. But often, it isn’t. Often they need to clean up their environment. One client actually moved her office because she recognized that working in the basement with no windows wasn’t supporting her to be a successful business owner. [Side note: that year she increased her income by 80%!]

Steps to creating your supporting working environment.

Now, there are many ways we can do this. What I recommend is that you take the time to first see where you are, then decide how you want it to be and figure out the steps to take to do it. This creates ownership. You have a psychological vested interest in it and your success.

Here are a few ways for you to begin:

• If you haven’t done it already, look around at your environment. What do you see? Is there anything that you are ignoring? What bugs you the most? Equally important is to make sure you take some notes especially around what just kind of gets ignored.
• After you have looked around, pause and ask yourself “How does this make me feel?” Jot down your feelings. Are they negative such as unorganized, overwhelmed or frustrated? Then ask yourself “How do I want to feel?” Again, jot those feelings down. Do you want to feel organized, calm and peaceful?
• Determine where to begin first. After you have taken stock of where you are, how you feel, how you want to feel you can determine where to begin. Maybe it is it vacuum the floor. It could be to clear off all the papers. Or it could be to first create a place for the things you have and begin putting them there. This is where getting help could benefit you. Though you want to make sure you hire someone who will ask the right questions, allow you to do the work yourself and be there for support.
• Set aside time in your calendar to create your supporting working environment. The trick here is to do it and get it done relatively quickly. Momentum will help you. The challenge some people have is that they get overwhelmed. And if you know that may be the case for you, create a list of what you need to do and set 30-60 minutes a day in your calendar to work on it.

You can do this.

If you are reading and thinking that this is daunting for you. It probably is. Especially where you are today. The good news is that once you have your plan, you’ll easily execute it. Probably in a similar manner that you run the other operations of your business successfully.

It takes awareness to see where you are, a vision of where you want to go and your plan to get there.

Some of my clients set a whole weekend aside to just get it done and then tweaked it from there. One of my clients knew it would be a stretch for her so she opted to use several of her coaching sessions and a few Complete It NOW! Sessions so that she’d have my support while she did her work.

If you’d like some help, set up your own Complete It NOW! Session and we’ll work toward getting things completed for you!