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Is Your Small Business A Success?
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Article 8: Take on New Yardsticks of Success
Are you successful? We can shout out a resounding “Yes!” if our business activities reflect our personal values.
As time passes, however, our inner values change. A twenty-something entrepreneur may not share his older peer’s love for travel abroad, for example.
And with changing values come changes in the measures of business success. Overlooking needed change in our success yardsticks is dangerous because we can end up engaging in business practices that frustrate our happiness and lead to a feeling of failure.
Every entrepreneur should keep a written statement of personal values that can be used as a guiding force to keep business operations on track. Just as important, though, is a regular review to assess the accuracy of that statement.
“We all change constantly,” says Ed Brodow, author of “Beating the Success Trap” (Harper Collins, 2004). “We’re not the same people we were 10 years ago, or maybe even five years ago. If we don’t re-evaluate on a regular basis, we end up stuck in old paradigms.”
Brodow suggests scheduling this annual four step review:
Identify those things in life that are meaningful to you Visualize a lifestyle that reflects your current needs Determine the changes you need to make Take action
“The first step in change is to recognize that life is not working as well as it should,” says John G. Agno, a certified business coach and president of Signature Inc. in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Sometimes a friend or a mentor or coach can help us get out of our comfort zone and obtain an arm’s-length view of where we are.”
Honest self-appraisals allow us to reject older values that no longer apply and identify new ones that have taken their places.
“Once we recognize our new inner values, we can use them to create new paths in our lives,” says Agno.
Knowing who we really are allows us to achieve true success.
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