Frame Your Words, Actions And Ideas.

Watch How You Think, Don't Limit Success.

A carelessly loose flapping tongue and a spontaneous decision-maker do not make for good business partners. Fire them if you own them.  They are not helping you win any business battles.  Trust me your business will face many battles.  To win at the business game, you will need to eliminate a loosely flapping tongue.  A tongue that spews out words with no idea of how those words can or should be used is a person who is destined to fail in the world of business leadership.  Watch your tongue closely.  Keep it in control at all times.  This kind of rule also applies to the actions and ideas a business owner has decided to process.  Make sure the things a business leader does makes good sense to do.  Make sure the actions and decision plans have had time to become part of a controlled effort before they are put into motion.  A great business owner does not operate well with continued spontaneity.  Continuous, spontaneous decisions do not fair well in the business world.  Get rid of them.  Get rid of those tendencies.  Get rid of acting like nothing has a plan of attack.  These are steadfast business rules.  Learn how to honor them.  These are some of the quiet, yet serious set of rules.   

This set of rules can be broken without a leader recognizing how they were broken.  A negative comment can be made in passing that can cost the leader a lot of needed support.  I once had an employee working for me several years ago.  She was born and raised in the United States but was half Caucasian and half Japanese.  She grew up and married her Caucasian husband.  She was a great employee for many years.  She became a great sales person, too.  Her numbers grew like she understood what she was supposed to be doing in sales.  She had a great knack for getting to know her customers.  One day she had a young couple in the store.  They were new to the area and were moving into a new home in a nearby town.  My employee was helping this young couple select some furniture for their new home.  The process seemed to be going well until she came back to my office and asked me to take over for her.  I was puzzled.  She did not appear to be doing very well, all of the sudden.  I asked her what was wrong?  She said she will tell me later.  She just wanted me to take over working for her with this young couple.  I got up and finished working the sale.  They were a nice couple.  I finished the deal and scheduled the delivery.  When I returned, I asked my employee what happened to her?  She said she could not handle that couple anymore.  She said she went as far as she could to help them but was just about to the end of her rope.  I asked her what was the matter?  She said she could not work with a 'mixed' couple.  He was African-American and she was Caucasian white.  They were married.  I was shocked!  I stood silent for a short moment.  I said, "Well what about you and your husband?"  She said, "That's different."

We need to recognize how our tongue, our actions and our plans can damage the work we do.  This young employee, even though the thoughts were out of line, recognized it.  I know it does not always make sense to think and do things in particular ways.  Sometimes the process of communication goes haywire.  Telling the truth is not always the best thing to say.  Just because she felt that way does not make it right to speak it.  Treating people the way we want to treat them is not always the best method to use.  These sets of rules are real and they matter to success a whole bunch.  Be very careful to control what you say, how you say it and be especially careful in doing what you do for work.  Your words, actions and ideas will often determine how much you will win or lose.  Become good stewards of these three things...words, actions and ideas.

Learn how to stick to success.  This employee was able to stick to success instead of her 'off' ideas about mixed marriages.  She recognized it well enough to eliminate working it wrong and saying something inappropriate to kill her success ratio.  She knew she would fail if she did not get away from the things she was thinking about.  She knew what she felt was likely going to hurt her results.  She made the decision to control what she said, how she acted and removed her presence of ideas away from her selling process with that couple.  She wanted to win even though she knew how she felt.  Winning was more important to her than processing the wrong ideas she was fighting to manage.  The truth is, she felt strongly about mixed marriages.  Even though she was one.  We all have these kinds of confusions running parallel with our own lives.  It might not be about mixed marriages but it will be about some other subject.  We have things we do in our lives that we do not support when others do them.  Humans are funny beings.  Learn how to keep the funny stuff in your life away from the working plans of your business model.  Success has a tendency to run away and hide from a loosely controlled tongue, spontaneous plans and random work.  These are not items listed on the top chart for making success happen.  Get rid of them if you have them.

Narrow Thoughts Guarantee Narrow Results.

I have seen many great speakers in my work travels.  I have spent a lot of time during the bulk of my career listening to motivational speakers.  Many of them were very good.  Some were not worth the time I gave them.  I made it a point to 'get a nugget' from everyone of them.  I figured that if I was going to take the time to listen to some speaker teach me something new, I was at least going to get one thing from the experience that I could use.  Just in case the speaker was a poor one, I was at least going to gain something from the experience.  I always went to the process with the idea that I was going to find at least one nugget that would be worthwhile.  I always found one.

One of the better speakers I remember was Charlie Tremendous Jones .  He was funny, filled with methodological efforts, and effective.  I remember a lot of his stuff.  He hit the mark on many planes.  His work was controlled, well-planned and effective.  I worked to find him again.  I have seen him more than once, by plan.  He has passed on but his work still remains.  Charlie once said we should never tell a story without a point nor should we ever make a point without a story.  Frame your words, actions and ideas.  Make sure they have meaning and substance before we process them.  Make your words count.  Line them up with the plans you have to succeed.  Do the work only that will help you manage how your plans see where you want to be.  Quit flashing around doing anything that comes to mind.  A mindless wandering through your business life will only secure corners and edges of failure results.  If my employee were to allow her mindless thoughts to wander about her tongue and working ways without the control she placed on them, she would likely have offended that mixed couple enough to scare them away.  She controlled her tongue, her thoughts and managed a better plan to deal with how she felt.  Her feelings were real.  They came from somewhere.  She controlled them with the needed respect to process her sales success.  Winning at business was more important than supporting how she felt.  She could have easily killed the sale quietly and all would have walked away without anyone knowing why it failed.  Frame your words, actions and ideas.  Give them some successful scenes.  Chose how they help you win in business.  Control how you deliver them to the outside world.  Make your success story include how you deliver your points.

A carelessly loose flapping tongue and a spontaneous decision-maker do not make for good business partners. Fire them if you own them.  They are not helping you win any business battles.

My tongue has caused me to experience many lost battles.  Battles that should have been won.  Battles that were stacked in my favor to begin with, but lost.  My tongue has done that.  My words were spewed out incorrectly, inappropriately.  They cost me some success.  I gave up success because I could not control my words.  I used my wrong thoughts to become how my words were chosen to be delivered.  My actions and my tongue have spun out of control and eventually wrecked a part of my victories.  Be careful.  Frame your words better.  In fact, sometimes you do not need to hang up any words at all.  Sometimes silence is the best thing to say.  Framing bad thoughts and bad words with a lot of garnish may not help you win any more battles.  Sometimes it pays better to shut up.  I have won some battles I should not have won because I kept my mouth shut.  Somebody else I was competing with used their mouth too much.  I won be default.  It deposits the same, if you did not know that.  The numbers go into the account the same way.  Learn to shut up when shutting up is the right thing to do.  Frame your words, your actions and your ideas with good work.

One of the other wonderful things I have learned on the trail to victory is that most of the best winners usually spend more time thinking and talking about ideas instead of people.  Those who spend more time talking about people are the bugger losers in the business world.  Those who spend more time talking about ideas are usually the bigger winners in the business world.  I have noticed this result.  That is another reason why I think it is best to frame how you think, how you plan, how you work and what you say.  If you are circling ideas instead of people, you are likely circling some good results.  You will land much better on ideas instead of people.  Circle ideas, not people.  You want to land well with your efforts.  Stop talking about people.  Start talking about ideas.

Frame your words.  Frame your actions.  Frame your ideas.  Get them moving in the same line.  Get them working with each other.  Make sure they dominate your daily movements.  Make sure you pay attention to how important your goofy thoughts are and learn how to select which ones need to surface at the appropriate times.  Your business success is not a free will process.  It will only come alive if you plan for it to happen properly.  Success is not an accident.  Telling a mixed couple that you do not like what they represent is an accident.  Learn how to frame your ideas, actions and words.  Give success a better chance to survive.

Until next time...