photo by Nina Matthews Photography

Free your mind…and the rest will follow!

If you want to be more successful you have to open up your mind and be willing to keep learning!  Obviously there are a lot of great books out there, SmartBriefs are an invaluable tool, there are a huge number of great blogs and if you haven’t checked out TED by now you are really missing the boat.

Along the same lines, another resource you should also check out is MindTools.  Mindtools has been around in some capacity since 1996 and they have a strong focus on helping people develop leadership and management skills…which is something everyone can benefit from.

Mindtools is a membership site (with a very reasonable cost structure) but they also have a lot of great tools and articles that are completely free.  Stuff ranging from Running Effective Meetings to a Burnout Self-Test.

You can eventually find anything on the internet, but MindTools gives you a great place to start if you’re looking for help or just some new ideas.  It’s a well done site with a lot of helpful business (and personal) development ideas – definitely worth checking out.

Have you used MindTools before?  What did you think?  What other sites are out there like MindTools?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

The holy grail of business is coming up with a competitive advantage that can’t be reasonably matched by your competitors.  If you can pull it off, you essentially don’t have competitors.  When you think of creating competitive advantage, you typically think of innovation, maybe technology, barriers of entry of some sort, maybe even some sort of geographic advantage (think oil fields).

However there is another way to develop a competitive advantage and although he doesn’t expressly lay it out that way, that’s what Guy Kawasaki’s latest book Enchantment (The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions) made me think about.  (Full Disclosure:  I received a free review copy of the book – thanks Guy!).

Quick – think about the coolest restaurant you’ve ever been to.  Maybe it’s an elaborately themed place in Vegas…or that hole in the wall diner where everyone knows your name and just fits you.  Or maybe it’s the place that got everything right and you walked out feeling like you had more than a meal, you had an experience.

That’s what Kawasaki means when he talks about Enchantment!  It’s about creating a genuine feeling of delight in your customers and prospective customers.

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photo by kozumel

I’ve said it before, but we live in Interesting Times…sure there’s the downside of the economy and the constant drumbeat of all of the negative news out there, But there’s also an amazing upside – we are seeing things today that would have never been thought possible 50 years (maybe even 10 years ago).  In fact the overall progress that’s been made is nothing short of staggering.

In fact it’s mindblowing!

Want some proof?  Check out these 2 videos a couple of friends recently shared as great examples of amazing things that are going on.

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photo presented by Beverly & Pack

Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays!

Now’s a great time to reflect on all of the amazing things in the world (like the Aurora Borealis…) and all of the important people in your world.

It’s also a great time to think about 2011 and what that might bring…so with that in mind, here’s a great article on 11 trends for small business in 2011.

A couple of the highlights for me:

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photo by kalleboo

Have you ever had the experience of shopping for a new car, where you finally decide on THE car that you really want to buy.  Let’s say it’s a new Honda sedan…and at that point, you suddenly started noticing all of the Honda sedans on the road – they are everywhere!

The reality is that the number of Hondas on the road didn’t change from one day to the next, you just tuned your Reticular Activating System!

The Reticular Activating System is the part of your brain that helps you filter out the unimportant stuff going on around you…and conversely focus on the important stuff.  Without that filter, you’d be overwhelmed with stimuli and likely lose the ability to function, so it’s an important part of your brain that most of us don’t know anything about!

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