can knock you off your game. Organization is absolutely essential. This task should be accomplished before you are open for business. With that said, even if time constraints make it difficult, don’t ever let anything take your focus off a live customer, whether in your store or on the phone. 2. Positive Energy — The second step is getting yourself positively energized. Your state of mind will dictate what happens for the rest of the day. We broadcast how we feel to everyone we come in contact with. When we’re “up”, we influence others to feel up. Unfortunately the contrary is true as well. Today is a new day and all things are possible. How do you get positively energized? It starts with you! When you are positive and upbeat with your co-workers, they’ll be with you. See the best in others and inspire them with your words and actions. You are like a tuning fork. The vibration you emit is what you attract. Whatever issues are bothering you, get rid of them any way you can. Avoid co-workers that are negative. Fix what can be fixed and accept the things you can’t change. 3. Set Goals — The third step is having a goal that is commensurate with the goals of management. You always want to make sure that everybody is on the same page. All of us are members of a team with different responsibilities. We’re all working toward the same end. Don’t be afraid to use what is available to you to achieve your personal goals and the company’s goals as well. By that I mean: utilize the support staff and tools that your company provides you with to promote everyone’s common interest. Your goals should be attainable with effort, and set by you. Impossible goals are frustrating and are quickly abandoned. Easy goals don’t challenge us to grow. Goals should be designed to stretch us in a variety of ways both in quality and quantity. Goals that only drive us to work harder, fall short when they don’t inspire us to work smarter. Take for example a basic metric of making more contacts with potential customers in order to grow your business. If all other metrics stay the same, you should see a proportionate gain in business. However, things may be different if you were to incorporate an improvement in the quality of the contact. It could be something as easy as making sure that you are physically putting an item of your product in every contact’s hand. You will see a better rate of growth with a better method. Therefore, you should have multiple goals and goals within goals. For example: your annual goals should be broken down by months, weeks, days. Sometimes it‘s even advantageous to break them down by the hour. There’s an old adage: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Choose your goals wisely, one bite at a time, and you will benefit in multiple ways. 4. Focus — The fourth step is getting focused. I differentiate focus from organization. Constructing a plan is different than mentally preparing for it. Focus requires belief in yourself and holding yourself personally responsible for whatever happens today. There are no excuses. Focus can be best understood as knowing what needs to be done and the realization that it’s well within your means to make it happen. Focus can help you eliminate things that distract you from your primary mission. It helps with putting things www.smokeshopadvisor.com
SAMPLE DIGITAL ISSUE 2014
SSA
53