Is Your Company Designed Around Your Strengths?

Most of us have an idea about what our character strengths are. A few years back, a scientist named Christopher Peterson developed a global list of 24 strengths that all humans have. These break down into the following six major categories:

Wisdom and Knowledge: Creativity, Curiosity, Judgment & Open-Mindedness, Love of Learning, Perspective
Courage: Bravery, Perseverance, Honesty, Zest
Humanity: – Capacity to Love and Be Loved, Kindness, Social Intelligence
Justice: Teamwork, Fairness, Leadership
Temperance: Forgiveness & Mercy, Modesty & Humility, Prudence, Self-Regulation
Transcendence: Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence, Gratitude, Hope, Humor, Religiousness & Spirituality

The science objective was interesting. Since Chris was a psychologist and most psychologists focus on nasty diseases like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and the like, I could see how he could get pretty sick of working with sick people. There was a brand new field emerging called positive psychology, which strangely enough, studied how to get us normal people from, well, just being kind of normal or not sick to a higher form of wellness called thriving where we were not only healthy but having a satisfied, meaningful, engaged, and happy life.

The 24 character strengths are a way to measure how we can tap into our natural character and leverage our best traits to become even better. The fun part is you can take a free test to see what your top five strengths are.

Millions of people have taken this test already. You can go online here, register for free, and get your scores immediately: http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx
The test you want to look for is the VIA Survey of Character Strengths, under the Engagement Questionnaire section.

Now what does this have to be with your work day? Everything. I’ll share with you my top five strengths:

1. Creativity, ingenuity, and originality.
2. Curiosity and interest in the world.
3. Gratitude.
4. Love of learning.
5. Leadership.

If you know me at all, you are probably nodding your head right now. I use my strengths every hour of the day. From helping my clients think of new revenue lines and new ways to help clients (creativity) to the “I appreciate your business” and “thanks” lines that I put in almost every email (gratitude) to running a group training program (leadership and love of learning), I “walk my strengths.”

Take the test. Then see how you can change your perspective to see your daily routines through the eyes of each strength you have. For example, if your key strength is curiosity (actually the most common #1 trait for people), are you always wondering how things are working, how you can do something better, or asking why? Doing more of that will fulfill you even more, and when you can do that in light of improving the client’s condition or your boss’s condition, then you have harnessed your strength for the good of your workplace.

The next step, once you become aware of your strengths and how you are currently using them, is to tap into them even more. How can you begin to use your strengths more throughout your day in the work you do and at home? You may want to write each of your top five strengths on your calendar, one per week, until the end of the year, so you can have fun with leveraging their usage.

It’s so refreshing to focus on the positive aspects about ourselves for a change instead of the negative. Give yourself the gift of knowing your strengths and using them more and more each day.

Let me know what yours are; you can post them right here on my blog. You know I’m curious to find out, of course!

The Power of Complimentary

Today’s biggest marketing challenge is getting people’s attention, then getting their trust. One way to completely knock down the trust issue is to let prospects receive a small sample of value from you at no charge. Because the trust factor is at an all-time historical low, you as an entrepreneur need to do one or more of several things before clients will do business with you in most cases:

1. Spend a lot of time developing individual relationships until people trust you,
2. Provide a complimentary sample of value up front,
3. Spend a lot of time in the proposal stage wooing the prospect.

Of those three choices, the complimentary sample is the lowest cost, especially if it can be massed-produced and delivered automatically via a web site or email. Even if you have to do all three (which in some cases, you do), providing something for free will shorten the time you need to spend doing the other two things.

What can we offer for free?

1. A free newsletter (no less frequently than every other week).
2. A free report.
3. A free video or DVD.
4. A free audio, MP3, CD, or podcast.
5. A free consulting, coaching or phone session.
6. A free proof-of-concept.
7. A free 30-day trial, as is common in software and memberships.
8. A free sample, such as toothpaste or shampoo.
9. A free serving of food.
10. A free quiz or evaluation.

As you can see, you have numerous choices depending on what you have for sale. The point is to allow your prospect the ability to sample or taste what you have to offer, providing good value, but not giving away the farm. If you offer information, coaching, or consulting, then your free offer will need to address one of the following:

1. The 3, 5, or 7 biggest mistakes that people like your prospect make when they use your services. For example, if you sell flowers, offer the 3 mistakes when giving flowers – one could be never send poinsettias to a cat owner because they are poisonous.
2. The 3, 5, or 7 things you need to know before you hire a person like you. For example, if you are a coach, offer the 7 things you need to know before you hire a coach – one being never hire a coach who hasn’t paid her coach as much as she is asking her clients for.
3. The 3, 5, or 7 most overlooked secrets to performing the service you do. For example, if you are a tax accountant, offer the 3 most overlooked tax deductions for 2011 – one being the making- work-pay credit that no one has heard about this year.

An important element to successfully attracting prospects with your free offer is to make it irresistible. Unfortunately, that also means taking a negative or dramatic slant. No one likes to make a mistake, and we’re completely curious as to whether we are making a mistake, so we will be drawn to a report that helps us avoid mistakes, more so than a report that gives us 3, 5, or 7 tips. If you can provide tips that will keep us from losing money, that will get our attention as well.

Here are a few more best-practice tips for positioning your free offering:

1. Always require something from your prospect in return for your free gift, such as their email address or phone number. Don’t forget your privacy policy and the can-spam laws.
2. Remember that you will need to market your free offering just like you do your regular service.
3. If you offer something that takes up your time like a free call, have your prospect self-qualify by requiring them to complete a longer form than just their email address. Ask questions that will give you good information about their situation relative to the service you offer. Turn the call into a sales call after you’ve provided value. People will expect this anyway.
4. Once prospects have accepted your initial free offer, move them up your marketing funnel into a low-dollar purchase or collect more information from them, such as address. Keep moving them up the funnel as they build their trust in you.

Try these tips to get people’s attention as well as to get past the low-trust barrier with prospects who are strangers.

The Power of Deadlines

In the accounting profession, there are a ton of deadlines.  Month-end, quarter-end, and year-end.  Payroll taxes, sales taxes, and corporate taxes.   And extension deadlines, filing deadlines, and payment deadlines, to name just a few.

All of these deadlines may be a headache to business owners and accountants alike, but they are a marketer’s dream come true.   How can you use deadlines to your advantage in marketing your services?  And what if you are selling a service that is not in the accounting profession?  We’ll answer these questions in this article and provide you with 5 ways to woo your prospect with deadlines.

1. Add compliance deadlines to your marketing message.

First, take a look to see if you have any deadlines you can leverage in your industry, and bring them into your marketing message.   Here are some examples:

“February 14^th is Valentine’s Day.  Go home with one dozen roses for her.”

“Who is preparing your W-2s this year?  Did you know they are due end of January?”

“Hurry!  Only 10 days left until Christmas.”

“Will you be ready for the IRS by April 15^th?”

In your elevator speech, it’s much more powerful for the prospect to be asked whether they have their W-2s handled versus you simply bullet-point listing the services they offer when you first meet a prospect.  Your prospect will be instantly engaged because you positioned your message in their world.

2. Fabricate deadlines that reward fast action.

“Register by March 10^th and save $100.”

“You’ll get 3 bonuses if you act by midnight.”

“I’ll give you 25% off if you decide before you get off the phone with me.”

“The first 10 people to sign up get an autographed picture of the celebrity.”

One saying I learned from the internet marketing world is that “Money loves speed.”  I don’t know who first said this, so please let me know if you know so I can properly attribute it.   I love to reward my early purchasers, especially for my events.   Offer discounts to individuals who register early or take the first version of a product.  The go up on your price as the product matures or the event approaches.

Make these fabricated deadlines as real as you can, so that they are believable and don’t feel arbitrary.

3. Offer payment plans that expire early.

This is something I noticed that Lisa Sasevich does with her promotions.  She offers numerous generous payment plans initially, then the longer ones disappear as the promotions progress.  For example, the deadline to sign up for the 5-payment plan might expire on February 1, the 3-payment plan disappears on February 15, and the 2-payment plan is no longer available after March 1.

4. The more deadlines, the more sales.

Department stores have long had a sale during every holiday weekend.  They know the more deadline-driven sales days they can pack into their annual promotion calendar, the more sales they will generate.  It works for other businesses too.  The more deadlines you can pack into your promotion, the more sales will peak at each deadline.

5. The shorter the deadline, the more sales.

Not surprisingly, peoples’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.   If they don’t buy right away, they might never get back to remembering about your amazing offer.   Give people enough time to act, but not so much time that they forget.  A few days, no more than a week, is a good window for most purchase decisions.

Think about how you act when there is and is not a deadline.  Every year, there is a line of cars at the main post office just before midnight on April 14^th.  Every year, there are shoppers that close down the stores on Christmas Eve.  These two are the mother and father of all deadlines, but there’s no denying that deadlines of any kind move people off their couches.

Try incorporating deadlines in your marketing messages and materials, and you might just be amazed at the difference a little deadline makes in your bottom line.

His and Her Brains at Work

Are men’s and women’s brains different, when it comes to the workplace? The answer is a resounding YES, and more importantly, science is finding that men and women work differently. When a woman works like a man does, her health suffers.

Here are three things that are different in men’s and women’s brains.

1. Women Are Soooo Emotional

Yes, women are more emotional than men, both on the positive and negative side. That’s because women are designed to feel emotions for intensely than men. This also makes women more susceptible to depression than men, which bears out in the statistics. The good news is, women can feel happier than men. But that doesn’t mean men are heartless creatures. It just means that women have a bit wider range of emotions than men.

On a related note, women have more wiring available to detect facial expressions than men. So women, you might have to give your man some extra clues to let him know if you are suffering and need his support. Men simply don’t have the wiring to know when you might be sad until the tears start flowing. Then they get it. The good news is, men can learn to detect facial expressions. Jobs like the police, detectives, attorneys, judges, ministers, and poker players all require exceptional people-reading skills, and men who lack these skills can go through special training to pick them up.

2. Honey, I Don’t Need to Ask for Directions

Generally speaking, men and women navigate differently. Men take more of a bird’s-eye view to get somewhere, relying on an allocentric approach. Women rely on local landmarks and how they are related to their own physical location in order to get from point A to point B, taking an egocentric approach.

On a related note, men also perform better on a task called spatial rotation. It was on our IQ tests in school, and it involved being able to mentally change the perspective of a 3D object in our minds and identify what it would look like when it was turned.

3. Darling, You Hardly Said a Thing All Night

Women have it all over men in the verbal department. The brain is functionally organized and there are two parts on the left side of our brains (sometimes the right if you are left-handed) that control our speech and language processing. Women’s are bigger. Women are also able to remember things better when the thing they are trying to remember can be associated with words.

Please remember, these are all generalizations, so there will be individual differences that defy the averages.

Men and Women at Work

Because of these brain differences, men and women’s differences should be honored and celebrated in the workplace. Women who try to succeed at business using men’s techniques will likely have health problems. One example is in sales: men tend to “conquer” or “capture” the prospect to close the sale. It’s like hunting. If men have fear or stress on the job, they simply force their way through it. They can do this, being testosterone-laden. Women can’t.

Women need to build relationships. They need to embrace their fears and be supported, not fight their way through things. If they fight, they will burn out their adrenals sooner or later, or they will get sick frequently.

When we can honor the differences of each gender, we can also leverage the unique strengths men and women bring to the workplace, without trying to fit into one another’s mold. It’s the differences that make it far more fun anyway.

How to Identify Your Character Strengths

How many times a day do we tell ourselves with the little voice in our head that we’re falling short of the ideal we have for ourselves?  “I forgot to add the salt, so I ruined the recipe.” “I’m not good enough.” “I was mistaken.” “I’m not smart enough.” “I didn’t get picked for the finals.” “Nobody likes me.” And so on.

Instead, why don’t we focus on our strengths?  Chris Peterson underwent an extensive research project to discover 24 positive character strengths that each person has to varying degrees.  They are:

You may or may not be familiar with the DSM: the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders.  It is the standard encyclopedia of mental illnesses that is widely accepted among doctors and psychologists in the mental health field.  It lists categories of illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

The people who birthed positive psychology, the study of mental wellness and flourishing, decided they needed a manual too.  They decided to focus on character strengths as one way to measure and record mental wellness.  The VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths was developed to fill this need.

I’d highly recommend you take the free VIA Survey of Character Strengths at the University of Pennsylvania’s Authentic Happiness web site:

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

The multiple-choice test will take less than 30 minutes and will rank your own strengths based on your answers.  You’ll learn what your top six strengths are.

You can read more about what they mean in your test results as well as on this page:

http://viacharacter.org/VIAClassification/tabid/56/Default.aspx

Once you know your strengths, you’ll be able to use them as a positivity filter in your life.  For example, many people have curiosity as their top strength.  If curiosity ranks high for you, spend a few days thinking about this trait, and notice how it manifests in your actions.  You’ll soon find yourself explaining your behavior by saying “I was just curious.”

When you can seek out ways to bring curiosity, or whatever the top strength is for you, into your life more, such as through cooking a new dish, reading a new genre, or exploring a part of town you didn’t know before, you will improve your emotions.

You may also be able to change your stress level by acknowledging and re-channeling your strengths.  “I’m so curious that it looks like I accidentally committed to too many things this month. I think I’ll call one of them back and cancel so I can relax more and use my curiosity in a different way that doesn’t increase my stress.”

Take the strengths test, and study your results.  List your top six strengths below:

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Next, think about how your strengths manifest in your actions.  Think also if they tend to stress you out as you fulfill them.

Ask yourself how you can use this information to enjoy your life more based on your strengths, and put that plan into action.

[This is an excerpt from my book “30 Days to a Stress-Free Life.”  Find out more here: http://www.stressfreestrategies.com/]