Preparing your attitude for Success


Understand the power of your “attitude” Keith Harrell states that attitude is everything!  Turning your attitude into action is the first steps to helping you tap into the power of your attitude and keep you grounded.  Your attitude can impact on everything you do.

 

In his book ‘Attitude is Everything’ he lists nine steps.  I will only summarise them for now but I suggest you invest in a copy of his book as soon as possible.

 

  1. Understand the power of your attitude: Your attitude is a powerful tool for positive action.
  2. Chose to take control of your life: To transform your attitude into action, you must accept responsibility for what goes on inside your mind by monitoring your internal dialogue.
  3. Identify through self awareness the attitude that hold you back or propel you forward: By practicing self awareness, you will learn the three types of bad attitude.
  4. Reframe your bad attitude: An attitude of anger can be transformed into an attitude of gratitude and forgiveness by shifting your perspective.
  5. Find your purpose and passion: Once you have determined what has been holding you back, it’s time t look ahead and analyse where you want to go. Understand it is important to have a personal vision, this is critical to achieving success.
  6. Be pre-active: When challenging circumstances threaten to provoke negative attitude that can hinder and throw you off course, developing a proactive approach to life will better prepare you to handle the hazards you face not just in your business but life.
  7. Discover. how to motivate yourself: Define your attitude kit with affirmation, visualisation, attitude talk, positive greetings, enthusiasm, spiritual empowerment, humour and exercise.
  8. Build supportive relationship: Nobody makes it alone in this world, we all need support. Put together you’re A-team those people who will help you fight off negative attitude. People with shared visions, shared values. Learn how to defend yourself against toxic people who just want to pull you down.
  9. See changes as an opportunity: One of the greatest challenges to a positive attitude is change, whether it is jobs, relationship or economical status.

 

The ultimate aim is to leave a lasting legacy by planting positive seeds of hope, encouragement, faith and love to the people around you be they your family, friends, clients, staff or suppliers. 

Remember that the first steps to any investment is in yourself, by first investing in changing your thinking, you can change and affect a lot more things around you than you think.

 

 

Business Planning tips by Diane Shawe

Extract from Chapter 3 Diane Shawe

One of the main reasons why some startups fail to make a profit in the hair and beauty sector especially when they seem to work their butts off for little reward is that the owners don’t plan a rout to making a profit. Sure they want to succeed, but they don’t prepare themselves for profitability.

 

They go into the business with beauty blinkers on. They think that, just because they are great hairdressers or beauticians or that they use to work in a hairdressers or salon,  and seen the revenues coming in, that if they are willing to work hard, that their fortunes will automatically come once they become self employed. Well it doesn’t work that way. Numerous challenges are cast upon everyone in business. This is not rocket science, but being aware that there is an unglamorous side to the business will better prepare you for the challenges that will always arise.

 

A lot of thought must go into writing a business plan, not because you want to impress your bank manager, borrow huge sums of money or just create a logo, it will help to train your mind into what you really want to do and what needs to be done in order to make the business profitable and successful.

 

Financial planning of the business is one area that must be taken seriously if you want to be profitable.

 

In most books and even motivating seminars, they always refer to ‘How to become successful’, I just want to take a look at success for a while and explain why you should dump the word success.

 

Everyone wants to be a success, and believe me success comes in very different ways.  For instance you can be a very successful technician, pianist, decorator, drunk or drug addict, looser or even failure. 

 

They say if you don’t plan for success you plan for failure, but by the nature of not planning, you are successfully achieving failure.  So lets get rid of the designer wrapping, it can often focus you on not really dealing with the cart before the horse.

 

Another word that is used often is Luck.  Whilst I do believe in luck, one cannot run ones business based on a lucky break!   I would like to introduce a word which is much more constructive and simulative in business OPPORTUNTIY!

 

There a hundreds of books that explain opportunity, coincidences etc., how many times have you said to yourself after the event ‘I know I should have done that, something just kept saying to me….’  Or ‘I knew I shouldn’t have done that….’

 

Entrepreneurs are different creatures to an extent, they usually follow their intuition.   We all have that but we chose to ignore it most of the time in favour of what sits in front of our eyes or someone else’s peer pressure.

 

For example, how many times have you heard friends, family, work colleagues or partners say ‘If I was you I wouldn’t….’ or ‘If I was you I would do…..? ?’  My point is who is the person that has risk financial stability to go it alone, to commit to employing others (looking after their financial needs) or even go out and offer a different service?   YOU!

 

Of course you shouldn’t think that you must do it all on your own, that your business revolves entirely around you. To make more than a wage, you must be able to delegate to other people. You should be able to have your business running smoothly whether you are there or not. There is no point in being a slave to your hair business. You must own your hair extension business, don’t let it own you.

 

If you are honest with yourself, you will know where your own personal weaknesses lay in order to help you avoid failure. You

Must know the pitfalls of running a business and whether you are equipped to deal with them. You must have sufficient capital.

You must have enough self-discipline to follow through with your decisions.

 

It is always a good idea to visit a number of hair salons, so you don’t get tunnel vision. Even if you have worked in what you think is the best hair salon, you still need to see what else is happening out there in the hairdressing world.

 

If you have worked in a few different hair salons, you will have an advantage.

 

You will be aware of different staff issues that may be an asset or a problem. Management is brilliant in some hair extensions, but poor in others. Some have absolutely fantastic leadership and teamwork. Some hair extensions have great staff training; some poor employees haven’t got a clue, because they are taught very little.

 

Hair extensions differ in many of their procedures. It is amazing to see the different levels of customer service, the way bookings are taken, the way pricing is decided. Everything is important to consider if you want to succeed.

 

A great way to thrive in business is to look at all of the things that can go wrong and then, find solutions to the problems before they can occur. It is better to be thoroughly prepared than it is to fix the problems later on.  However this does not mean that you must be a master of doom and gloom, one needs to be positive and focus on the bigger picture.

 

There are many contributing reasons for non profitability which results in business failure:

  • No proper business planning: Business planning
  • Not enough funding or funding spent on wrong things
  • lack of internal procedures and organisation
  • lack of well defined goals
  • insufficient knowledge of the hairdressing business
  • Unqualified staff
  • Not properly researched services
  • targeting the wrong clientele
  • under pricing and over pricing
  • too much or too little risk taking
  • inability to cooperate with others
  • lack of staff cooperation
  • negative personalities
  • adverse market conditions
  • paying too much for the business
  • bad spending habits
  • employees’ inexperience and lack of skills
  • running the business as a friendship
  • inability to delegate
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