Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Happiness.


Humans generally have the tendency to operate from the paradigm:
Have -> Do -> Be.
Implying, If I “HAVE” this -> I will “DO” that -> and thus “BE” that (For the future)
&
If I “HAD” that -> I would have “DONE” that -> and thus “BECOME” that (For the past)
However, if we were to keep questioning ourselves on the purpose of our existence, my take is that we exist for the purpose of being Happy!
Now, if that is true, then we should reverse the paradigm and “BE” Happy and “DO” everything that gives us joy & Happiness and the whole world shall connive to make us “HAVE” everything & more than we need to help us “BE” Happy.
Here comes the interesting part.
Humans are one animal who is Happiest when “Giving” Happiness!
So, what should one “Give” ??
There was this absolutely wonderful lady who was Happiest when she was serving and helping the destitute women & children in the streets of Kolkatta. She knew how to “Love”. Her passion was to “Serve” with whatever she was good at, and she was good at “Loving” and taking “Care” of people. She decided and made it her life mission to take care & “Give” the abundance of “Love” that she possessed. She did, what she was BEST at, and she gave her whole life to fulfill the one purpose she had, and it was not in taking, it was in giving her everything to love and take care of the destitute women & children of the streets of Kolkatta. She was awarded the Noble Prize amongst so many other awards, she is known as a Saint. We all know what a wonderful, caring, loving & Happy human being that Mother Teresa was.
What I have learnt from the above is that, I must find my life purpose, I must find what am I good at, I must find what gives me joy & Happiness, I must find my passion, and having found it, I must share, I must show others the joy that I have and how everyone can possibly have the same joy & Happiness by sharing & giving & loving & just by being a good human being.
There is enough and more in this world for Mankind’s needs. It is Mankind’s Greed that is causing all the problems.
I have no clue if my rantings above make sense.. or even if they are the real truth, but lately I have come to believe in this, and find that I’m so much a Happier person.

Monday, December 26, 2011

The Multividual Man


The Multividual Man

Narayan Devanathan /  December 26, 2011 (The author is National Planning Head, Dentsu Marcom)


The Indian man of the future isn’t one. He’s many. Meet the Multividual Man. He’s the ways he is because of social forces around him. And because he can be. But first, those social forces.

Pre-Independence, the Indian Male was defined by a single-minded patriotism. “I wear my country on my Khadi sleeve. Test it at your own risk.”

Post-Independence, the Indian Male was about security. Ensuring it for himself and his family. At all costs to himself. It was only after roti, kapda and makaan were secured by the 1980s Indian Male to a certain extent that he started focusing on himself, as an individual.

As a Ladies Man. As the “Impossible is Nothing” man. As the man that others looked up to. Especially female others, gazing up at him while riding pillion on a fast and not-so-furious bike. Or so he saw his own image. Being seen by others as emulate-able was important for him.

And then along came Liberalisation. Of the wallet and the mind. And a new millennium that brought with it an inner-directedness. To an extent only though. It manifested itself as the man who oozed confidence as India on the global stage, enjoying its many moments in the limelight. He was no longer showing off to the galleries. He was merely showing his prowess at the helm.

All around him though, the world was changing furiously, doing more things simultaneously to itself than it had ever seen in multiple millennia. It was as if the world could only keep pace with itself by multi-tasking. Not surprisingly, it asked the same of its people. Do more. Be more.

That’s when he morphed into the Multividual Man. His identity was now to be split into many. How to manage this schizophrenia without becoming unbalanced was the challenge before him. How is this different from the different life roles that man has played in the past? Was he not Brother, Career Man, Lover, Husband, Father, Caregiver before too? It’s just that he’s made peace with paradoxes. Inside him and in the world outside. He doesn’t think having a good time has to be at the cost of the earth. Or cost the earth either. Responsibility doesn’t have to hamper his freedom. Nor do career considerations need to temper his adventurous spirit. Because I am We.

Some marketers have marked this multividuality as experimentation, restlessness or just the ephemeral nature of youth. Like FasTrak, urging him to move on. Multividual Man, though, doesn’t feel the need to move on so much as move around, within his multiple selves. Other marketers, like Titan, seem to recognise his multividuality, and equip him to Be More.

So what selves should a marketer engage with? As people, we are not uni-dimensional. Neither are brands. So recognise the single entity that Multividual Man is, but cater to the multiple selves within. While this is contrary to all the accepted wisdom about single-mindedness of messaging and positioning, the fact is that if a brand’s persona has to engage with real persons, then it must be as colourful, as diverse in its characteristics as the people it wants to engage with. E unum pluribus will be the new mantra. Out of one, many.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

4 ways to take control of your email



If your email Inbox is out of control, you might want to rethink your methods for organizing your email and emptying your Inbox. Developing a new approach to processing your Inbox can help you to gain more control, improve your response time, and keep up with critical actions and due dates.

This article covers four key factors that can help you process your email more efficiently—both at home and at the office. Although some of the productivity tools mentioned here are specific to Microsoft Outlook (Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007, and Outlook Web Access), most of the techniques—and even the organizational attitude described here—can help you to more efficiently process email and empty your Inbox, even if you use an email application other than Outlook.


1. Set up a simple and effective email reference system
The first step toward an organized Inbox is understanding the difference betweenreference information and action information.

·     Reference information is information that is not required to complete an action; it is information that you keep in case you need it later. Reference information is stored in your reference system—an email reference folder, your My Documents folder, or a company intranet site, for example.
·    Action information is information you must have to complete an action. Action information is stored with the action, either on your to-do list or on your Calendar. (If the action needed is a detailed reply, try converting information into professional communication using these tips on Creating incredible documents more easily using Office 2010.

Most people receive a considerable amount of reference information through email. Sometimes as much as one-third of your email is reference information. So it is essential to have a system that makes it easy to transfer messages from your Inbox into your email reference system—a series of email file folders where you store reference information to ensure you have easy access to it later. Learn more about setting up a reference system.

After you take care of filing your reference information, you can use the next three steps to handle the email that you have to do something with—your action information.



2. Schedule uninterrupted time to process and organize email

How many times are you interrupted every day? It's nearly impossible to complete anything when there are constant interruptions from the phone, people stopping by your office, and instant messaging. So it's critical that you set aside uninterrupted time to process and organize your email.

Many email messages require you to make a decision. The best decisions require focus, and focus requires uninterrupted attention. Establish a regular time each day to process your email so that you can empty your Inbox. Of course, you can scan your email during the day for urgent messages or requests from your boss.
Book yourself a recurring appointment for an hour a day to process email, and mark that time as "busy." During that hour, don't answer the phone or take interruptions, and work only on processing your Inbox. You can also turn off the audio alert that sounds each time you receive a new email—which can be a distraction in itself. In Outlook, click the Filetab. Click Options. On the Mail tab, under Message arrival, clear the Play a sound check box.

At first, keeping these appointments will take discipline. But over time, the discipline becomes habit. And after you completely empty your Inbox, you'll see the value of this one hour a day and you'll stick to it like glue.
Microsoft Outlook 2010 makes it easier to keep this email appointment and to process your Inbox. The new anywhere access features of Outlook 2010 mean that you don’t have to be at home or at the office to keep your daily email management appointment.

Conversation view in Office 2010 enables you to organize email folders by date and conversation. When Conversation view is turned on, messages that share the same subject appear as conversations that can be viewed as expanded or collapsed, helping you to quickly review and act on messages or complete conversations.

Also, improved search tools in Office 2010 make it easier to narrow your search results by using criteria, like sender or subject keywords, and other information, such as attachments. The Search Tools contextual tab includes a set of filters that efficiently focus your search to isolate the items that you want. For more information, see Find a message or item by using Instant Search.
Instant Search in Outlook 2010 provides many ways to search your email for specific messages.



3. Process one item at a time, starting at the top

When you sit down to process your email, the first step is to sort it by the order in which you will process it. For example, you can filter by date, by subject, or even by the sender or receiver of the email message. In Outlook 2010, on the View tab, in the Arrangement group, click the arrangement option you want.
From the View tab, you can filter your email by date, category, sender or receiver, and more.
You can also change the arrangement directly from your Inbox. To display the list of options, under the Search box, right-click the Arrange By: box.

The Arrange By: box in your Inbox gives you convenient access to even more options to arrange your messages.
Tip: If you use Outlook 2010, enable the reading pane (called the preview pane in Outlook 2007) so that you can view your messages without having to open them. To enable the reading pane, on the View tab, in the Layout group, click Reading Pane. To enable the Outlook 2007 preview pane, on the View menu, click AutoPreview.

Resist the temptation to jump around in your Inbox in no particular order. Begin processing the message at the top of your Inbox and only move to the second one after you've handled the first. This can be hard at first, when you might have thousands of messages in your Inbox. But as you reduce the number of messages over a few sessions, eventually you'll get to the point where you can process the 60–100 messages you get every day and regularly get your Inbox down to zero.



4. Use the "Four Ds for Decision-Making" model

The "Four Ds for Decision-Making" model (4 Ds) is a valuable tool for processing email, helping you to quickly decide what action to take with each item and how to remove it from your Inbox.
The expanded Ribbon in Office 2010 is designed to help you quickly find the tools that you need to complete your tasks. Features are organized in logical groups collected together under tabs. You can also customize the Ribbon to include tabs you personalize to match your own style.
The expanded Ribbon in Outlook 2010 replaces Outlook 2007 menus, giving you easy access to tools on conveniently organized tabs.
The Quick Steps feature, new in Outlook 2010, speeds up managing your email even more. This feature enables you to perform the multi-stepped tasks you use most often, such as moving email to a specific folder or moving a message and replying to it with a meeting request, with a single click. The Quick Steps gallery includes buttons for one-click file and flag, sending messages to your team, and other popular commands. For more information, see Automate common or repetitive tasks with Quick Steps.
The Quick Steps feature turns your most frequent tasks—whether forwarding messages to your co-workers or copying messages to a specific folder—into one-click operations.
Tip: Learning a few basic keyboard shortcuts in Outlook 2010 can make performing these tasks even easier and faster. Read our article on how to save time with quick computer shortcuts.

Decide what to do with each and every message

How many times have you opened, reviewed, and closed the same email message or conversation? Those messages are getting lots of attention but very little action. It is better to handle each email message only once before taking action—which means you have to decide what to do with it and where to put it. With the 4 Ds model, you have four choices:

1.    Delete it
2.    Do it
3.    Delegate it
4.    Defer it

Delete it

Generally, you can delete about half of all the email you get. But some of you shudder when you hear the phrase "delete email." You're hesitant to delete messages for fear that you might need them at some point. That's understandable, but ask yourself honestly: What percentage of information that you keep do you actually use?
If you do use a large percentage of what you keep, your method is working. But many of us keep a lot more than we use. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you decide what to delete:
·    Does the message relate to a meaningful objective you're currently working on? If not, you can probably delete it. Why keep information that doesn't relate to your main focus?
·    Does the message contain information you can find elsewhere? If so, delete it.
·    Does the message contain information that you will refer to within the next six months? If not, delete it.
·    Does the message contain information that you're required to keep? If not,delete it.

Outlook 2010 helps you get rid of the “noise” in your Inbox by providing two new commands: Ignore Conversation and Clean Up Conversation. If a conversation is no longer relevant, you can prevent additional responses from appearing in your Inbox. TheIgnore command moves the whole conversation and any future messages that arrive in the conversation to the Deleted Items folder.

Easily delete an entire conversation so that no new responses to it will appear in your Inbox.

When a message contains all the previous messages in the conversation, you can clickClean Up to eliminate redundant messages. For example, as people reply to a conversation, the response is at the top and the previous messages in the conversation are below. Use the Clean Up command to keep only the most recent message that includes the whole conversation. For more information, see Use Conversation Clean Up to eliminate redundant messages.

Cleaning up your conversations makes it easier to stay focused on the task being discussed.

Do it (in less than two minutes)

If you can't delete the email messages, ask yourself, "What specific action do I need to take?" and "Can I do it in less than two minutes?" If you can, just do it.

There is no point in filing an email or closing an email if you can complete the associated task in less than two minutes. Try it out—see how much mail you can process in less than two minutes. I think you will be extremely surprised and happy with the results. You could file the message, you could respond to the message, or you could make a phone call. You can probably handle about one-third of your email messages in less than two minutes.

Office 2010 helps you respond to email messages faster. You can view the availability of a person and instantly reach out to them using a variety of communication methods—all on a new easy-to-access contact card. You can even customize the context menu of the contact card to include tasks you perform most often, saving you more time.

Delegate it

If you can't delete it or do it in two minutes or less, can you forward the email to an appropriate team member who can take care of the task?

If you can delegate it (forward it to another team member to handle), do so right away. You should be able to compose and send the delegating message in about two minutes. After you have forwarded the message, delete the original message or move it into your email reference system.

Defer it

If you cannot delete it, do it in less than two minutes, or delegate it, the action required is something that only you can accomplish and that will take more than two minutes. Because this is your dedicated email processing time, you need to defer it and deal with it after you are done processing your email. You’ll probably find that about 20 percent of your email messages have to be deferred.

There are two things you can do to defer a message: Turn it into an actionable task, or turn it into an appointment. When you're using Outlook, you can defer emails that require action by dragging the messages to your Task List to turn them into tasks. Name the task to clearly state the required action so that you don't have to reopen the email message. The result is a clearly defined list of actions on your Task List that you can prioritize and schedule to complete on your Calendar. Or you can turn the message into a meeting request by dragging it to your Calendar.

Tip: Use the To-Do Bar in Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007 to drag an email message from an email folder to a date on your Calendar or to your Task List. On the View tab, in the Layout group, click the To-Do Bar. When the bar appears, drag the message to your Calendar or to your Task List. This copies the message to the new location; it doesn’t move it out of the original mail folder, so you’ll still be able to find what you need. Learn more about managing your Task List in Outlook.

Use the 4 Ds model every day

Using the 4 Ds model on a daily basis makes it easier to handle a large quantity of email. Our experience shows that, on average, people can process about 100 email messages an hour. If you receive 40 to 100 messages per day, all you need is one hour of uninterrupted email processing time to get through your Inbox. 

Our statistics show that of the email you receive:
·  Fifty percent can be deleted or filed.
·  Thirty percent can be delegated or completed in less than two minutes.
·   Twenty percent can be deferred to your Task List or Calendar to complete later.

Of course, if you have a backlog of hundreds of messages, it will take time to get to the point where your daily routine keeps you up to date. It's important to get that backlog down, so I would suggest setting blocks of time aside to work through it. Then, you can really enjoy processing your messages every day using the 4 Ds.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The 50 New Rules of Work


  1. You are not just paid to work. You are paid to be uncomfortable – and to pursue projects that scare you.
  2. Take care of your relationships and the money will take care of itself.
  3. Lead you first. You can’t help others reach for their highest potential until you’re in the process of reaching for yours.
  4. To double your income, triple your rate of learning.
  5. While victims condemn change, leaders grow inspired by change.
  6. Small daily improvements over time create stunning results.
  7. Surround yourself with people courageous enough to speak truthfully about what’s best for your organization and the customers you serve.
  8. Don’t fall in love with your press releases.
  9. Every moment in front of a customer is a moment of truth (to either show you live by the values you profess – or you don’t).
  10. Copying what your competition is doing just leads to being second best.
  11. Become obsessed with the user experience such that every touchpoint of doing business with you leaves people speechless. No, breathless.
  12. If you’re in business, you’re in show business. The moment you get to work, you’re on stage. Give us the performance of your life.
  13. Be a Master of Your Craft. And practice + practice + practice.
  14. Get fit like Madonna.
  15. Read magazines you don’t usually read. Talk to people who you don’t usually speak to. Go to places you don’t commonly visit. Disrupt your thinking so it stays fresh + hungry + brilliant.
  16. Remember that what makes a great business – in part – are the seemingly insignificant details. Obsess over them.
  17. Good enough just isn’t good enough.
  18. Brilliant things happen when you go the extra mile for every single customer.
  19. An addiction to distraction is the death of creative production. Enough said.
  20. If you’re not failing regularly, you’re definitely not making much progress.
  21. Lift your teammates up versus tear your teammates down. Anyone can be a critic. What takes guts is to see the best in people.
  22. Remember that a critic is a dreamer gone scared.
  23. Leadership’s no longer about position. Now, it’s about passion. And having an impact through the genius-level work that you do.
  24. The bigger the dream, the more important the team.
  25. If you’re not thinking for yourself, you’re following – not leading.
  26. Work hard. But build an exceptional family life. What’s the point of reaching the mountaintop but getting there alone.
  27. The job of the leader is to develop more leaders.
  28. The antidote to deep change is daily learning. Investing in your professional and personal development is the smartest investment you can make. Period.
  29. Smile. It makes a difference.
  30. Say “please” and “thank you”. It makes a difference.
  31. Shift from doing mindless toil to doing valuable work.
  32. Remember that a job is only just a job if all you see it as is a job.
  33. Don’t do your best work for the applause it generates but for the personal pride it delivers.
  34. The only standard worth reaching for is BIW (Best in World).
  35. In the new world of business, everyone works in Human Resources.
  36. In the new world of business, everyone’s part of the leadership team.
  37. Words can inspire. And words can destroy. Choose yours well.
  38. You become your excuses.
  39. You’ll get your game-changing ideas away from the office versus in the middle of work. Make time for solitude. Creativity needs the space to present itself.
  40. The people who gossip about others when they are not around are the people who will gossip about you when you’re not around.
  41. It could take you 30 years to build a great reputation and 30 seconds of bad judgment to lose it.
  42. The client is always watching.
  43. The way you do one thing defines the way you’ll do everything. Every act matters.
  44. To be radically optimistic isn’t soft. It’s hard. Crankiness is easy.
  45. People want to be inspired to pursue a vision. It’s your job to give it to them.
  46. Every visionary was initially called crazy.
  47. The purpose of work is to help people. The other rewards are inevitable by-products of this singular focus.
  48. Remember that the things that get scheduled are the things that get done.
  49. Keep promises and be impeccable with your word. People buy more than just your products and services. They invest in your credibility.
  50. Lead Without a Title.
I encourage you to share + discuss + debate these with your team and throughout your organization. Within a quick period of time, you’ll see some fantastic results

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

What your Twitter Feeds say about you

All you micro bloggers who share links, and pain, with the world, find out what your Twitter feeds say about you
Namrata.Bhawani@timsgroup.com

Twitter may have mercifully reduced the bandwidth for sharing information, but even then it isn’t hard to go from trivia to trivial in 140 characters. Social media gave us the platform to express ourselves and that’s when the dam burst. People have used it as a confessional, fed their narcissistic streak or turned into self-styled Deepak Chopras without his ability to spell.

If you’re a tweetaholic, you’re probably following or being stalked by one of these varieties that grows like fungus on the micro-blogging site. Analyse your tweeting pattern to see if you have inadvertently morphed into a reckless Twitter deviant:

THE CUTIE-PIE FROM HELL Babies are cute, but having said that, all babies look like little blobs and yours is no more precious than the thousands of others. Baby talk, a stream of cute compliments, a show of constant appreciation, etc, show a need to be loved. People pleasers are nice, but it takes a toll on them eventually. Show some spunk and watch the change.

VERBAL VOMIT
Just because a thought is dancing around in your head, doesn’t mean it needs to be unleashed on an unsuspect ing public. Silence really is golden, and brevity really is the soul of wit. People with verbal diarrhoea think fast, act faster, but may not consider the consequences of their actions. The need to share constantly indicates lack of a strong support system or childhood trauma.

GYAAN GURU If you’re prone to recycling clichéd philosophies about life, imagination is not your strong suit. You’re a softie, but prone to laziness — if you’re substituting soul searching for second hand platitudes, you’re probably not about to go out of your way for people. We bet you our month’s salary that your bookshelf is stocked with Paulo Coehlo, Rhonda Bryne’s The Secret and The Monk who Sold his Ferrari for inspiration.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN
When there are blasts or an earthquake, you feel left out if you can’t add to the buzz. Twitter has created a whole new brand of Causerati. But Good Samaritans tend to be a nuisance. The need to save the world shows that you are a giver, but only give when someone asks, you’re not a walking, talking charitable trust. You’re well-meaning and will probably make for a good friend or partner.

SELF-PROMOTER
The self-promoter values his time. It’s about ambitious goals like networking, promoting your own product, blog or website. So much for building a community. Selling yourself is a finely-tuned art, so subtlety is not a bad quality to acquire. People who succeed in their goal in cyberspace usually have wit and charm for support. 

EMOTIONAL GARBAGE
If you’re feeling depressed, nostalgic or just PMSsing, we don’t want to know. If your doodhwala didn’t come this morning and your fridge broke down, we don’t care. If your boyfriend broke up with you, there is probably a good reason for it. People who have public emotional outbursts tend to be dreamers, emotionally fragile, trusting and romantics at heart. Get a positive outlook on life, find a balance between cynicism and blind trust.

THE WANNABE
Stalking celebrities and hoping that they retweet one of your messages, incessant brand mentions, boasting about your sexual escapades are all hints of being a wannabe. Self-esteem and maturity issues are at work here. A desperate vibe is singularly unattractive, and perhaps you may want to examine the image you want to project on a public platform. 

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

The legend of the Phoenix

The legend of the Phoenix bird comes from ancient history.

It goes that this bird lives for a thousand years. At the end of this period, it starts to make a nest and then, when the thousand years are at its end, it sits down and goes up in flames. Out of the ashes a new phoenix appears to live for another thousand years.

Legend states that it can even change into a human being after 5 cycles.

For me it means that it is possible to renew one self in order to reinvent one self. We have to see the possibilities to rise from the ashes.

When the Phoenix rises from the ashes a new era starts.

My strong belief is that everybody can rise from their ashes and start all over again. We just have to see the possibilities. And the possibilities are there. They are already in all of us.

Each and everyone of us starts their life as a strong human being. We have an indefinite amount of inner strength. But in the course of our lives, life-events occur that break down, bit by bit, this inner strength.

We get uncertain, lose our selfconfidence. People try to thrust themselves upon us through intimidation and sometimes even through agression and violence.

Through the Phoenix example we can see, feel and know that we can be strong again, to see possibilities instead of boundaries.

The Phoenix teaches us to re invent ourselves, experiment and continue until we are supremely happy being what we are.

The Phoenix helps us learn that to fail is normal and expected and natural, but to let the failure stop us from heading towards our goals of being happy is an act of cowardice, inhuman and unacceptable for the supreme species that inhabits this earth.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

3 Powerful Skills You Must Have to Succeed in Sales

by Sharon Michaels

A key to successfully sharing and selling a product, service or idea, is to ask questions and then listen quietly and carefully to the answers. Many of us try too hard to “convince” people to buy instead of discovering what our future customer or client really wants, needs and desires from us.

To succeed in sales remember these three listening and relationship building skills:

S – Sincerity – Listen without an agenda, it’s not about your needs.

E – Ethics – It’s not about trying to talk someone into something, its about listening to what they want.

A – Asking – Serve others by asking questions that will assist them in making a wise buying decision.

Building win-win relationships means remembering that it is not about what we want but what the other person wants. Here are three relationship building skills that when used regularly will have you increasing sales and creating satisfied loyal customers.

1. Listening sincerely and without an agenda. The buying process is not about you and your wants and needs, it is about the customer. Too many of us come to the sales table with our own agenda. We are sometimes too busy thinking about quotas, promotions and commissions. It’s not about us; it’s about the wants, needs and expectations of the prospective buyer.

A sales person with an agenda tends to push too hard and often doesn’t listen well. Leave your agenda at home. Sincerely focus on your customer and how your product can best serve their hopes, dreams and goals. Zig Ziglar said it best, “You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”

2. Help talk someone into something. Allow them to make their own buying decision. Doing what is right for everyone involved is the ethical thing to do. I’m reminded of a phrase from Dale Carnegie’s book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

Your role in the sales process is to present your product in a clear, concise and truthful manner—with integrity. The best customer is the customer who can make an educated decision based on what is best for them. A loyal customer is an educated customer. You are not in the convincing business; you are in the sharing business. Your job is to ethically offer the product, service or idea, explain the benefits and answer questions. Your customer or client will then make a buying decision based on the information they’ve been given. Making the sale is about asking questions, answering questions and building a trustworthy win-win relationship.

3. You can serve your client/customer best by finding out what they want, need and expect from what you are offering. Sometimes, we are so excited to share everything we know about what we’re offering that we forget it is about your potential customer’s expectations. What is important to you may not be important to them.

I’m reminded of a story: A young mother just starting out with a large network marketing company was excited and eager to share her business with other stay-at-home mothers. She was having coffee with a potential recruit as their children played near by. The young mother was eagerly showing her products and explaining the business potential. She went on and on about how she could stay home with her children and didn’t have to leave the house to conduct business.

The mother who was listening seemed to suddenly turn off her interest and attention. When our eager young network marketing mother asked her friend to join her in the business, the friend replied with a resounding, “No,” The business-building mother was shocked and saddened, “Why?” she asked. “Because,” her friend said, “I want to be able to do something that allows me to get out of the house and socialize with other adults.”

Moral of the story: Ask questions and listen. Don’t assume that what is important to you is important to your future customers.

Successful selling isn’t about what you want, it is about how can you best serve the needs of your customers and clients. Coming from a sincere place of service, will help increase sales and develop loyal client and referral base.

Keeping the three elements of SEA (Sincerity, Ethics, Asking) in mind, you can easily and effortlessly find new customers and clients who will want to do business with you now and in the future. Selling your service, product or idea is about doing the right thing for everyone involved – it is about building win-win relationships.