Battling Balance! Do you have the same problem?

I went to a great talk this morning on Battling Balance and I wanted to share some key points with you.

Jenny Campbell, is a Lawyer with a large Sydney based firm. As she called it, “back in the dark days”, she was 216 kg and worked 24/7.  She was part of the tribe who called people who talked about balance and a desire for it ‘wimps’. She came to understand that stress is real and it has a bad effect on your body, and so set out to loose the weight. She started to do this in the same obsessive way she had worked, and is now at the stage of finding a balance between work, fitness and a social life.

However, as was discussed this morning: To achieve something big you have to be out of balance. Are you going to tell me that Olympians have a balanced life? But, at what point does imbalance become unhealthy.

Key lessons from this morning:

• People only build 1 facet of their life at a time and this causes other facets to fall down which in turn pulls down the one thing you were spending all your energy building.
• Esteem comes from how close our view of ’self’ is to our perception of ‘ideal’, but we have a tendency to question self, rather than ideal. Why do we believe the ideal?
• Being out of balance can de-motivate as well as motivate. If you are given an ideal that is too far from where you are at, you might not bother trying to get to the ideal.
• They identified a simple formula to ignite change:
  Dissatisfaction + Vision + First Steps to take > Resistence that I am feeling

Setting up a mastermind group

In January this year, I invited 3 business owners I knew, but didn’t know each other, with non-competing businesses, and different skills, to be part of a mastermind group – we now call it Great Minds Group (which is much easier for email communication because you can abbreviate to GMG!).

I thought I would share the process with you for a few reasons:

1. It has been immensely beneficial for Tribe Research
2. Lots of people have personally asked me about it
3. There have been LinkedIn questions about Mastermind groups, indicating their appeal and curiosity about them.
4. We are presenting a day at Small Business Month indicating the success of our group.

At the first meeting everyone gave an overview of their business and how they came to starting it. I researched Mastermind groups on the internet and provided a summary.

The group then decided:

• Meet monthly for 2 hours in the city
• Each meeting would focus on 2 businesses (an hour for each)
  
• The issue to be dealt with at the meeting to be emailed the week prior to the meeting so it can be considered
• To operate with an understanding of confidentiality, not a signed agreement
  
• Any member can be asked to leave if there is a conflict and people are free to leave themselves (neither has happened yet)

Our first meeting wasn’t awkward, everyone was excited by the opportunity and accepted the consensus of the majority. Another business owner has been invited and they were happy with the decisions already made.

For me, our Great Minds Group is useful for getting other business owners views and ideas. It is a support crew that I regularly catch up with, share success with, and don’t feel the same isolation that you can feel when it isn’t all going according to plan.

My Advisory Board that meets every 6 weeks, and has been for just over a year, can then be used for strategic and financial issues – where the ideas from the Great Minds Group are discussed and strategic direction is developed.

At a Great Minds Group meeting a few months ago we formed the idea to host a day at Small Business Month. We saw how we provide total business solutions for each other and on a monthly basis spend 2 hours working on our business. Read more about: Total Business Solutions – A Day Working ON YOUR Business. Hope to see you on Sept 22 and help you spend a day on your business.

I would love to hear your views about mastermind groups…

The power of statistics in your PR

Last week I went to one of my favourite networking events, Last Thursday Club, and heard Valerie Khoo talk about getting a journalist’s attention in your media release. Valerie reinforced the value of doing your own research well. Here are three key quotes from the night:

“Statistics are your friend”

“Use quotes from your customers”

“Use your own database”

She provided an example for getting the press’ attention, where an accounting firm calculated the proportion of their clients that needed adjustments to their tax return – adjustments that the firm were able to make to maximise their client’s return. Because the media release included a statistic, the media were drawn to the release and able to create a news story from it. Even though the firm didn’t mention how many people they included in their research and didn’t hide that it was their database that they were reporting on.

Conducting a well designed survey on your own database can give you powerful statistics that you can then use in your own media release to gain exposure for your business.

Why not start now?!