Posts Tagged: Power Language

Coaching / Keep Calm & Keep Marketing / Mindset — No Comments
31
Jul 12

Keep Calm and Keep a Positive Mindset – part 4

These trading times represent a difficult period for small business. Up and down economic cycles are inevitable and if we just keep positive, hang in there, and get through this difficult period, we will get some relief at the next up turn. This series of Keep Calm articles has been created to help improve feelings of confidence and personal power; part 4 provides tips for managing your mindset.

Taking positive action is the first step to feeling more in control.

Here are three simple business mindset habits that will have the potential to radically alter the effectiveness of your mind and the potential of your business:

Give up trying to be perfect if you want to be successful! 

We try to show customers that we are flawless to be liked and respected.  But you can’t please everyone, and you shouldn’t try. When you embrace who you really are and decide to be authentic, instead of perfect; you open yourself up to authentic customer relationships, authentic happiness, and tangible success.

Manage your Negative Self-Talk!

Besides our own thoughts, there is nothing that is absolutely in our control. Positive thinking is at the forefront of every great success story. The mind must believe it can do something before it is capable of actually doing it. So, be aware of your negative self-talk – replace it with positive self talk and a positive outlook.

Reflection is the key to changing mindset!

Find some quiet each day for reflecting on both positive and negative experiences that came up, and look for habitual patterns that you need to change. Learn from your daily reflection. Work on a positive mindset every day because it will be 80% of your success in business.

Ask yourself: What is the positive mindset you can apply today? Please leave a comment – I’d love to hear from you?

Author, Teresa Bassham principle Marketing Coach at Zenworkz Marketing, inspires small businesses to foster a positive marketing mindset and develop a empowering marketing plan for business profitability. See full services at http://www.zenworkz.com

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Authentic Message Creation / Branding / Marketing 101 / Mindset — No Comments
21
May 12

5 Step Technique for Naming your Excellent Idea or New Business

Getting creative at naming your excellent idea, or new business, or products, or services, is the heart of authentic marketing. While you need to be professional in your marketing, I believe it’s more important to let your passion and personality shine through, rather than try and impress people with all your knowledge, experience and credentials.

Thinking in a creative way or tapping into the huge store of information in your subconscious mind is skill that can be learnt, and this 5 step technique provides a process to help you use imagination to find solutions to problems like creating a unique and compelling name for your idea or business.

Step 1 – Gather all the information needed to think deeply about your business idea or name: Describe the solutions your idea or business provides in 30 words or less.  List the benefits of your idea, business, services and products – what benefit do you want your customer to know about you? Are you the best, highest quality, most caring, most reliable, most unique? List the main benefit your competitors promote – how do you want to position your business in your customers minds compared to your competitors?  And who are your ideal customers – describe a typical person who will want what you provide – and what main benefit will they receive?

Step 2 – Begin the task of digesting all this information about your business: Take the different elements of the information which you have gathered and identify the words that relate to key benefits that you need to keep uppermost in your mind, in order to think creatively about naming your idea or business. What you are seeking now is the relationship between all the facts above, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle. To maintain your focus, write your key benefit words on sticky notes on your computer screen or on your fridge, so that you can keep the need to resolve the name in front of you.

Step 3 – Conscious and subconscious processing task:  Brainstorm as many names around a single customer benefit – as you can – there are no right or wrong answers now – just name ideas generation.  Avoid the big words. Keep it simple. Just use plain English about the problems your customer is facing and how you can help them.  Pick out the words that represent your business – can any of those words be grouped together in a way that is either a description of your business, or a fictional or made up name using these benefit words? Are any words suggestive of the benefit for your customer? Select your favorite words and again, write them down on sticky notes, to keep them in your mind.

What you have to do now, is to turn your creative thinking over to your subconscious mind and let it work while you do something else.  When you reach this third stage in the production of a name for your idea or business, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Exercise, listen to music, watch TV or a movie, read something completely irrelevant to your task.

Step 4 – Allowing the name to come into your mind: Everything will click in the fourth step of what will seem like an “a-ha” moment. Out of nowhere the name will appear.  It will come to you when you are least expecting it, while showering, or exercising, or most often when you are half awake in the morning.  It may even wake you up in the middle of the night.

Step 5 – Putting your new business name to a reality test:  It requires a patient working over to make most business names fit the exact conditions in which they must work.  This is where many good name ideas are lost.  Many are often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put name ideas to work in the current environment.  It’s now important to submit your name idea to the criticism of friends and mentors.  When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good name idea has self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it, to add to it. And possibilities which you have overlooked, will come to light.

The aim of naming your new idea or business should be to create strength in the minds of your customer.  The words need to resonate in their minds and stand out from the rest.  Once you have some strong name ideas – you can easily understand how searchable your words are by using Google’s Keyword tool.

Get your business name right and you get the branding as a bonus. When your potential customer senses you’re speaking to them authentically, odds are they’ll be more likely to want to do business with you. And its more fun to work with people you like!

Give it a shot. You might just be surprised at what happens!  Leave me a comment if you are?

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the principle of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small and medium business professionals to research their customer market; create their authentic marketing message; attract more ideal customers; and create a marketing plan to achieve success in 2012/2013.  She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coaches customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled “Create your Authentic Message” workshop on 6th June, 2012 or request distance coaching online –please contact me.

While you are visiting my website – subscribe for weekly e-News updates on all topics related to authentic marketing.

For daily Authentic Marketing updates visit and “like” my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

 

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Authentic Marketing / Social Media — No Comments
2
Nov 11

How to Ask Engaging Questions (to improve Social Media response)

When small businesses begin to use social media for marketing, they are often disappointed by the response they get.  Some of this is due to their approach to really engage their audience through asking questions.

If asking questions is so critical to audience engagement, why aren’t we spending more time and energy on discovering and framing them? It’s probably due to the fact that as a small business we focus on having the “right answer” for our audience, rather than discovering the “right question”; and don’t always understand that discovering the right question is the path to engaging our online community in dialogue and discovery.

It’s actually quite easy to recognize an engaging question when we find one on a social media platform.  These are the questions that invite and challenge us to reflect at a deeper level and often stir up emotions that we feel we must share.

Asking a question as simple as, “What do you think?” or “What can we do that could help?” or “What could make a difference?” can have a startling impact on response rate; and lead to creating new knowledge and insight from the community in your social media network.

The important impact with social media is that an engaging question has the capacity to “travel”, that is to spread beyond where it began into larger online networks of conversation throughout a social media community.  Questions that travel well are often the key to large-scale exposure, awareness, insight and action.

Here’s how to frame questions you might ask your online audience as you begin to explore the art of asking engaging questions:

  • What outcome do you want this question to achieve? What sort of conversation, meanings and feelings do you imagine this question will evoke?
  • Is the question relevant to the interests of your online community?
  • Is this a real question – a question to which you really don’t know the answer?
  • Is this question different enough to evoke a new response?
  • What assumptions, values or beliefs are underlying the way this question is worded?
  • Is this question likely to generate imagination, engagement, creative action and new opportunities?
  • Does this question leave room for new questions to be raised as the initial question is explored?

As conversations unfold, important values that people really care about will start to come up – values like personal growth, mutual respect, community contribution and sharing with others.  These responses provide you with valuable insight into your audience’s thinking, allowing you to evolve your questions  and improve your future engagement.

So, I’d love to hear what engaging questions have you had the most response to in your social media community?

About the author: Teresa Bassham is the Coach & Boss Lady of Zenworkz Authentic Marketing, and is passionate about educating small business professionals to create their authentic marketing message and attract their ideal customers.  She runs local workshops in Northern NSW and coach customers online and by phone – if you would like to attend the next scheduled workshop or request distance coaching online – please contact us.

For more regular Authentic Marketing updates visit and like my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/Zenworkz.Authentic.Marketing

 

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Building High Performance Teams / Developing Resourceful People / Leading Change & Transitions — No Comments
6
Aug 10

The Power of Language – guaranteed to improve business results

The language used by business leaders, managers and supervisors has been proven to be the best investment they can make in building resilient and resourceful teams; and driving innovation, creativity and exceptional results.

Language has the power to either stimulate and have a positive effect on culture, actions and results; or have the reverse effect, to stifle initiative, morale, and enterprise.

Most of us at some time in our working life have experienced the individual who is quick to discount others ideas with comments such as e.g. “we tried that once and it didn’t work”, “people will not go for that”, “we don’t have the budget”, “head office won’t support it”, and so on.   Many of these individuals were highlighted in “How to lead Cave Men and Mussels”.

It’s important to be mindful of language which is used by leaders, managers and supervisors to ensure a positive effect on culture,
actions and business results.

Improvement and innovation requires leadership to challenge language that reflects perceived wisdom, practice, habit or culture may no longer be appropriate within a business.  Changes in legal and business requirements, technology, culture, societal expectations and behaviour of competitors require leaders to model both language and behaviour which builds resourcefulness, resilience and appropriate contribution by others.

John Ralston Saul writing in The Collapse of Globalisation says:
“we function through organised habit, particularly when it comes to language. We change it with difficulty. Vocabulary, phrases, arguments can become like prisons. They can prevent us getting to the next stage …. acquiring habits of action for coping with reality”.

How do we know when our use, or non use, of language is stifling our “coping with reality”, when that reality is changing market conditions, regulatory requirements, competitor practice, current business results; and is not producing  innovation, creativity, and valued business?

There are 3 methods for improving your business language, innovation, creativity, and a valued business – the first two methods involve observation, measurement and reflection and the third, action to improve.  They are:

1.  Observations about initiative, innovation, positive culture, creativity and value

Are there widespread initiative, innovation, positive culture and creativity in your business; or just demonstrated by a few individuals?  Do any, many, or just a few add continuing value and results to the business?

2.  Measures

Regular surveys of Customer Satisfaction, Team Needs Analysis, 360 Degree Surveys, Suppliers Ease of Doing Business, Competitor and Marketing Research compared with Business Results, will reveal whether your workplace business language stimulates or stifles innovation, creativity, and building resilient and resourceful work teams.

3.  Action to improve – coaching and practice acting on observation, measurement and reflection

Observation and measurement will identify the areas where results indicate that the use, or non use, of appropriate language to support and stimulate initiative, innovation, creativity, resilient and resourceful work teams, and business results; needs improvement.

Once this data is gathered, a skilled coach can work with individuals to improve their questioning, instruction, delegation, individual and group interaction language skills to boost business results.

About the author: Brian Bassham is a Director of Zenworkz and a skilled facilitator and coach, who helps businesses effectively source the right information that improves their decision making and bottom line results.

Caveat: This information is original content informed by 30 years of experience, observation and study of Australian and International workplaces.  It is important to understand differences between industries, countries, and their archetypal expectations when applying this information.

All or parts of this blog are able to be published with permission from the author – provided that the author is acknowledged and a link is given to the original source blog.

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