“Specific plans regarding when, where and how a person will act have been termed ‘implementation intentions’,” explains Professor Mark Conner from the Institute of Psychological Science at the University of Leeds. “We already know that these kinds of plans can be really effective. You set up cues that prompt your planned behaviour - ‘if I walk to work on Monday, then I will jog home’, ‘if I feel hungry before lunch then I will eat an apple, not a chocolate bar.’ ”

But research by Professor Conner and his colleagues Dr Andrew Prestwich and Dr Rebecca Lawton from the University of Leeds has now demonstrated that this effect can be made even stronger if you get other people - friends, family, colleagues involved too.

The Leeds team worked with employees from 15 councils who volunteered to participate in two studies attempting to increase their levels of exercise or improve their diet. Some employees were just left to do it on their own; others were asked to recruit a partner. A third group were encouraged to develop ‘if…then…’ plans, and a fourth group was told to makes these ‘if…then’ plans with a partner.

“We followed up after one, three and six months to see how the employees were doing. And it was quite clear that working together and joint planning really helped employees stick to their new exercise regimes. Moreover, the involvement of a partner in planning   had a sustained effect that was still noticeable after six months.”

Professor Conner warns that roping in a buddy is not a guarantee for success. The real power is in matching your ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’ so you have powerful cues for your new behaviour. When all else is equal, forming exercise plans with a partner will increase your chances of actually sticking to them.

These findings could be applied to various government and NHS initiatives, such as smoking cessation programmes or the current drive to reduce obesity. Instead of putting all the onus on an individual, people should be encouraged to work with others and form clear ‘if… then…’ plans. “Individual change can of course happen,” notes Conner, “but it is even better to have a friend on your side!”

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Source: Economic & Social Research Council

It’s a pitch-black winter night and Troy Espiritu is in the middle of a forest somewhere in western Georgia. Espiritu, a compact, wiry man with close-cropped hair, jogs along the wilderness trail with a steady, dogged pace, his face a mask of exhaustion. He’s been on the run since yesterday morning, nearly 20 hours ago, and he’s utterly spent. Shivering uncontrollably from the cold, he notices that the trees on the margins of his headlamp beam seem to be falling on him. I’m hallucinating, he realizes. He’s already run the equivalent of three consecutive marathons, and he’s got a fourth left to go. If he can keep pace, he’ll cross the 100-mile mark just as the sun rises.

Ultramarathons like this one are among the most grueling competitions ever devised, defying conventional notions of what the human body can do. But Espiritu is tough: He’s completed four 100-mile races. And what’s even more remarkable is that just five years ago, he was an ordinary guy who couldn’t jog more than two miles at a stretch.

At age 35, Espiritu, a podiatrist, was raising a family and managing a growing medical practice. “We had a 4-year-old, 2-year-old twins, and a newborn, with no family nearby to help,” he says in his genteel Southern accent. The thought of taking on another challenge, not to mention a superhuman one, would seem inadvisable at the least. But as Espiritu was to discover, pushing yourself in one area can have positive ripple effects in other domains.

Espiritu’s transformation started with a few words from a friend. At the time, Espiritu was jogging a mile and a half each weekend to keep fit. At church, a member of the congregation mentioned that he’d noticed Espiritu out running. “There’s a group of us that meets every Saturday morning,” the man told him. “You ought to come out.”

With his fellow runners’ encouragement, he achieved longer and longer distances. After a few months, he was able to make it to three miles—though, he says, “I was sore for about a week after.” What kept him coming back was the group bonhomie. “It’s like hanging out in the bar and having a beer,” he says. “It’s guy time.”

Within a few months, some of his running buddies started training for a marathon, and suggested he join them. Espiritu agreed. “I love putting a plan together, and working at that plan, and checking things off on the calendar,” he says. “I’m a very goal-oriented person.”

Espiritu’s wife, Mary Denise, wasn’t surprised at the turn her husband’s hobby was taking. “I knew that eventually he’d start running marathons,” she says. “That’s just the way he is. I don’t want to say he’s obsessive, but when he does something, he does it 120 percent.”

As Espiritu notched up marathon after marathon, he learned about races that were longer still—the so-called ultramarathons, which can range from 32 miles to more than 100. At first, such distances seemed absurd, but Espiritu kept thinking about it, and realized that if he could run 26.2, then 32 wouldn’t be that much harder. And once he’d done his first 32-miler, 40 didn’t seem out of reach.

To prepare his body, Espiritu gradually inured himself to the hardships of extreme distance. He would come home each Friday evening after working all day long, eat dinner with his family, put his kids to bed, and then start running at 10 p.m. He’d return at 6 a.m., shower, coach his kids’ soccer game, and keep going all day. “With practice, it definitely got easier to handle,” he says. “I can function now on less sleep than I did before.”

Early on in his all-night runs, Espiritu passes the time with mental games, such as spending 10 minutes thinking about each of his children. But by the later stages, he’s so exhausted that he’s frequently hallucinating or falling asleep on his feet. “The way I handle it is to break things up into very small, manageable pieces,” he says. “The idea of running 100 miles is incomprehensible, even for me, sometimes. My only goal is to get to the next aid station. That’s it.”

In an ironic twist, Espiritu is a podiatrist engaging in a hobby that nearly guarantees multiple foot ailments. Espiritu has had heel spurs and stress fractures—conditions he says make him a much better and more sympathetic doctor, especially to the running aficionados who now seek him out to get his first-hand expertise.

Espiritu understands that his pastime can be hard for others, including exercise buffs, to fathom. “Patients ask me all the time, ‘Why would you do that?’ The short response is, ‘Because I can.’ I’ve learned I can do it, so why not do it? If you knew that you could run 10 miles, why would you want to run just two?”

His wife teases him by saying, “Your heart is in great shape, but you should get your head checked.” She’s not the only one to suggest he might be a little bit crazy. “Let’s face it, running 100 miles is abnormal. Statistically, probably less than 1 percent of the population can do that,” says psychologist Jonathan Abramowitz, who specializes in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorders. But, he says, Espiritu’s behavior is very different from this illness—the struggle to contain or prevent thoughts about an outcome that a patient wants to avoid.

Rather, says Abramowitz, Espiritu is unusual in the degree to which he becomes attached to positive goals. “Some people have an all-or-none personality. They feel that they either have to do something perfectly or it’s 100 percent crap. When that mind-set causes distress, that’s a problem. But if it’s not getting in the way of your life, then I wouldn’t say you have a disorder.”

Beyond his love for long-term planning and execution, it’s likely that Espiritu is driven by the many mood boosters hidden in the training process: “Achievements give us a temporary feeling of elation,” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a social psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The How of Happiness. “But it’s the pursuit of goals rather than the achievement that creates happiness. When people run long distance, they often get into an engaged state of concentration called flow. They are truly in the present moment, and the present is all we have.”

For her part, Mary Denise says that her husband’s extreme regimen has actually been a boon for their home life. “When our children were small, he took up golf for a little while, and that just wasn’t working. He’d leave at 9am on Sunday morning and come home at 2pm,” she says. “This is healthier for him, and we get to have him around more. He can run all night and still spend the next day with the kids.” Mary Denise has become an avid runner herself—the two sometimes hire a babysitter so they can train together. She even paced her husband for a full 25 miles during one of his ultramarathons—a bonding experience that they will always remember.

John Cobis, a high school teacher and fellow ultramarathoner who has trained with Espiritu, affirms that Espiritu is, in fact, as balanced as he appears to be. “Troy doesn’t miss a beat with his children. He runs a thriving medical practice and his patients love him,” Cobis says.

For all the pain, both mental and physical, that long-distance running has caused him, Espiritu considers it an irreplaceable part of who he is. It’s made him more even-keeled: “I’m an avid LSU football fan,” he says, “and before, when I would watch a game on TV that wasn’t going well, I would scream and yell. The dogs would be all nervous and running around, and Mary Denise would take the kids and say, ‘You know what? We’re going to leave the house for a little while.’ Now, when my team’s losing, my attitude is: ‘Ah, no big deal.’”

Right now Espiritu is in the process of buying property and hiring an architect and a contractor to build a new medical building. “I’ve been meeting with banks and architects, civic designers and engineers, real estate agents,” he says. “It’s an elaborate process. A couple of years ago, I would have said, ‘I just can’t do it all.’ And now it’s like, ‘If I can find time to run 90 miles a week and have four kids and run a practice, surely I can do this.’”

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Source: www.psychologytoday.com

When you begin to dream big dreams, your levels of self-esteem and self-confidence go up immediately. You feel more powerful about yourself and your ability to deal with what happens to you. The reason so many people accomplish so little is because they never let themselves lean back and imagine the kind of life that is possible for them.

A powerful principle that you can use to dream big dreams and live without limits is contained in what Elihu Goldratt calls the “Theory of Constraints.” This is one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern thinking. What Goldratt has found is that in every process, in accomplishing any goal, there is a bottleneck or choke cord that serves as a constraint on the process. This constraint then sets the speed at which you achieve any particular goal. But if you concentrate all of your creative energies and attention on alleviating the constraint, you can speed up the process faster than by doing any other single thing.

Let me give you an example. Let us say that you want to double your income. What is the critical constraint or the limiting factor that holds you back? Well, you know that your income is a direct reward for the quality and quantity of the services you render to your world. Whatever field you are in, if you want to double your income, you simply have to double the quality and quantity of what you do for that income. Or you have to change what you are doing to make it worth twice as much. But you must always ask yourself, “What is the critical constraint that holds me back or sets the speed on how fast I double my income?”

A friend of mine is one of the highest-paid commission professionals in the United States. One of his goals was to double his income over three to five years.

He applied the 80/20 rule to his client base. He found that 20% of his clients contributed 80% of his profits. And that the amount of time he spent on a high-profit client was pretty much the same as the amount of time he spent on a low-profit client.

This article continues…

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Welcome to the power of client retention and nurturing; one of the most valuable processes in business, and one of the most neglected.

Business owners work hard and invest substantially to acquire clients. Yet, once clients are converted they rarely utilise processes that maximise the client’s value.

Acquiring a new client is between 6 to 20 times MORE costly than retaining and nurturing an existing one.

Let us demonstrate.

Let’s say you advertise your coaching services in the Yellow Pages. Your advertisement costs $4,000 and you convert 10 clients. Your Cost of Acquisition is $400 per client. Each client is converted, on average, into a 3-month one-to-one coaching contract, valued at $1,500. Your gross profit is $1,100 ($1,500 - $400). 

Your net profit ($1,500 - $400 – all other expenses) is $750.

Most coaches stop there. They feel as though their job is done. In fact, some coaches have the perception that unless a client specifically requests additional services, it’s unethical to propose more services.

Of course, this paradigm of thinking is preposterous. Only by (ethically) getting your clients to undertake a wide range of products and services over an extended period of time can you be of significant value to your client. By limiting their access, for whatever reason, to valuable products and services, you are doing your clients a disservice.

Limited Thinking = Limited Business

The truth is, most businesses fail to think past their first core transaction. This is disappointing and destructive commercially. But it’s most disappointing from a relationship perspective. If you can’t think past your first transaction, it’s impossible to truly serve your clients. Only by approaching the relationship from the perspective of longevity can you create true, enduring value for your clients.

Do you know the number 1 reason clients cease to do business with you? Apathetic Despondence. Your clients don’t feel that you really care. In most cases it’s not that your client stops doing business with you – it’s that you stop doing business with them! Business owners think they’re doing their clients a wonderful service, simply by providing the bare skeleton necessities. They don’t create value in the relationship. They don’t develop a clear point of distinction. They don’t show they care.

As a purchaser of services and goods, how many transactions would you be involved in each year? Hundreds? Maybe even thousands of transactions with different businesses. When was the last time you felt genuinely cared for; special; nurtured by a business? Possibly never!

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to be served by a business person that genuinely cares about you, you know first hand the loyalty this creates. You buy from them again and again. You’ll travel ridiculous distances, pay more, and buy more frequently… simply because they care. And that makes you feel important.

An Economic Case

As well as the ethical case for retaining and nurturing clients, there is an excellent economical case. Referring to the example earlier, let’s see what happens when we nurture our clients.

Your Yellow Pages advertising resulted in 10 clients, each earning you a net profit of $750 each. At the end of the 3-month one-to-one contract the majority of coaches display their Apathetic Despondence and fail to nurture their client. This results in the relationship reaching a ‘natural’ end.

However, if you nurtured your client over an extended period, they may also invest in: Teleconference Series ($197); Bootcamp ($3,500); Group Coaching ($1,000); Seminars & Workshops ($500); eBooks, eCourse, etc ($500). That’s $5,697.00 income.

You’ve multiplied your gross income by almost 4 times. Your nurturing costs are practically negligible, meaning your net profit has increased by 7 times! This strategy alone can almost immediately turn a coaching business making $30,000 per year into a business earning $100,000 + per year.

How To Retain & Nurture

Retention and nurturing strategies are simple, fun, and low cost. So many businesses fail at nurturing that it makes nurturing such an easy process and massive point of distinction for those businesses that do!

Here are some retention and nurturing strategies to implement immediately:

Link clients and prospects into a regular communication cycle. Regular communication is paramount to any retention and nurturing system. It’s impossible to build a relationship if you do not regularly and predictably communicate. Many businesses ‘dig up’ their databases to use as promotions. This is destructive. You are asking without first giving. Clients and prospects will resent you for this. But they’ll love you for giving them something for nothing; and then providing them with an opportunity to invest.

Thank clients for doing business with you. Most businesses behave as though the client is the lucky one to be using their service. You may behave like this without even knowing it. After every session, service, or product purchase you should THANK your client. Send them an email; sms; card; letter; small gift. Make them feel special and valued.

Give away’s. We all love unexpected gifts. An excellent nurturing and retention strategy is to give away high perceived-value, low cost gifts.

An excellent way to create value for your clients, at little or no cost to you, is to develop joint ventures with other businesses. For instance, you could approach health spa’s and get them to provide a free treatment voucher. They are often willing to provide a free treatment as a loss-leader to acquire new clients. This strategy can be applied across a broad range of services.

Add-value to the relationship. Send clients specific information relating to their challenges. Send research, reports, tools, press releases. Anything that your client will find interesting.

Go further than expected. The key to creating true value is to go further than your client would reasonably expect you to go. If you do this, you tilt the reciprocal obligation in your favour, and your client will feel indebted to you.

And here are some additional pointers to keep in mind…

Focus your marketing on existing clients. Your current clients have already overcome certain hurdles to doing business with you. They are much more likely to buy from you again. Focus most of your time, efforts, and resources on better serving your current clients. Go deeper rather than wider.

Be consistent in your approach and interactions. Treat clients with honesty, humor, and respect. Present a consistent, solid, and professional style to your clients - one they can grow to depend on.

Follow through on your commitments. If you promise to send information or to follow up, be sure to do this. You’d be surprised at how many professionals promise to send information, but then never do. You will gain loyalty and trust by doing what you say you’ll do.

Allow yourself to connect. Find out about their lives, hopes, goals, and desired outcomes. Ask questions that encourage a deeper sense of shared understanding. The greater the level of connection, the greater the mutual satisfaction.

Have fun. It’s easy to get caught up in goals, outcomes, deliverable. Whilst clients do want outcomes, they also want to work with people who enjoy what they do. The more fun you can have while providing strong outcomes, the longer your clients will stay.

Position yourself as a resource for life. Tell clients at the beginning that you want to be their coach for life. That means they can always come back to work with you no matter how much time has passed between meetings.

Ask for feedback and input. At intervals throughout the working relationship, solicit feedback and input. Ask your clients how they feel about working with you and ask if they have suggestions for how the working relationship or outcomes can be improved. Asking for their ideas shows that you care about their opinions and value their contributions.

Share resources. Do you know of a good book that your client might benefit from reading? Tell him about it. Do you have the name of someone who could help your client move ahead on her business plan? Tell her about it. Sharing resources is a terrific way to build loyalty and satisfaction.

Reward them for staying on. You might consider implementing some kind of loyalty or perks program, where your long-term clients are rewarded for staying on. You might offer them gifts, products, or services for a certain level of ongoing participation with your business. Maybe Gold or Platinum Membership to your exclusive club.

Keep learning. The more you focus on gaining new knowledge, new skills, and new experiences, the more you have to offer your clients. The more you have to offer, the more they will benefit. The more they benefit, the longer they stay. Keep focused on your own professional growth and learning - make this a priority. Both you - and your clients - will gain.

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Boy have we gotten busy with work. Our reasons range from economic necessity to expressing our inner voice’s mission to having a creative inspiration inside that just needs to be manifested NOW. Either way, with the ability to access our computers 24/7 many of us at times forget to balance our work time with our personal time for exercise, family time, spiritual practices, relaxation and plain fun.

Of course when a project that excites us or sparks our life’s mission includes exercise, creative or physical pleasure then we get to combine it all, but many folks are sharing that their family, body or community is getting neglected due to the scale weighing too heavily on work and not enough on other aspects of life and our soft addictions don’t allow us to put down our cell phones or iPads and stay off our laptops.

I suggest to balance your work/life by changing your life from one of default to being proactive by design.  Here’s 5 tips to help you do that.

1.) Take some dedicated time to examine your work/life scale. Make an appointment with you as the CEO of your life to make a plan to balance the work/life scale.

2.) List what is important to you. Keep your health, family and friends, and social causes, etc in mind when you consider your commitments and make a conscious, intentional choice about what you can give yourself over to and get behind it 100%.

3.) Make a list of what you want to do in key areas of your life. From health, career, relationships, relaxation, fun, to personal growth, put what you want in your calendar first. Having your priorities and desires clearly mapped out in this way greatly assists you to stay on track and move in the direction of what you really want.

4.) Keep your word with yourself. This is essential. This is key to give you a rock-solid foundation from which to create the balanced work/life you desire.

5.) Listen to your body. Instead of taking action by default, you follow your plan and make choices that register in your body that are aligned with your desires. If your body says “no,” to a busy project, listen. Your body when it lines up with your perfect work/life plan becomes a reliable barometer that can remind you to make choices in every moment that will give you the life you desire and deserve.

Source: Psychology Today
 

1. Details of the situation including where you were, what you were doing and with whom;
2. What were you thinking about the situation;
3. How you felt physically e.g. relaxed or tense;
4. How you felt emotionally;
5. What you did and how it turned out.

For example, one entry in the stress log might look like this:

1. Situation: at home in the morning, rushing to go to work, while the wife and kids have breakfast. 
2. Self-talk: “I’m going to be late again: the boss will be sarcastic about it again and I’ll have trouble coping.
3. Physical feelings: getting tenser by the minute, my daily headache is starting already;
4. Emotional feelings: worried frustrated, fed up
5. Behaviour: snapped at the kids and went off to work feeling guilty.

Once you know what the stressors are you can take action to bring about change. We are now in a preventive stage and your client can make adjustments in their physical environment, change their thinking patterns and introduce relaxation strategies. With these in place they have a good chance of combating the midday slump.
 
A change in the physical environment may be nothing more than adjusting the lighting or their chair the work space, or at home it may be a simple matter of painting the kitchen a brighter (or duller) colour and rearranging the furniture so that they don’t trip on books. With awareness of what contributes to their stress your client can take steps to change events.
 
For example referring back to the above situation, our client in this case can have everything that they need for work ready the night before – they can set their alarm fifteen minutes earlier and they can then have time to start the day with a relaxing breakfast with their family. This will contribute to eliminating their negative self talk, the headache and the guilt for being short tempered with the children. Chances are that with a less stressful start to the day they may avoid being stressed and tired by the afternoon.
 
If our client has observed that their self talk is a major contributor to their rising stress through the day, with your assistance they can learn how to change their negative self talk to more positive, healthy talk. For example your client (in this case a working mom) stressed while cooking the evening meal before she heads to work may think to herself: “He (her husband) never helps me at all. I have to do everything around the house. I’m always the responsible one.”
 
This black and white thinking can be changed to “I often do cook more meals – but he does do the cooking on the weekends and helps with the housework and garden.” This is a less emotive thought and can reduce the tension around this issue resulting in less stress.
 
To further help relieve the build-up of stress during the day you can introduce your client to physical exercises, relaxation exercises and visualisation and meditative exercises. If your client spends most of their days at a desk, phone or computer they can do periodic exercises with their hands.
 
For example they can massage them inside and out with their thumbs and fingers and then gently bend their wrists back and forth or just make a fist and open the hand a few times. They can make sure that they get up at least once an hour, even if it is just to move around the workstation and stretch so as to rebalance their body. Eye exercises can help relax tired ‘computer eyes’.
 
When on a break instead of a coffee – either at the office or at home – your client can initiate some deep breathing or progressive muscle relaxation. And to help your client stay balanced they can be encouraged to practice meditation and yoga postures whenever they feel distressed.
 
Additional information on stress can be found in the following articles: “Developing a Balanced Lifestyle” and “Helping a Client Combat Stress”
 
To summarise the process so far the coach is identifying the client’s stressors and is introducing ways to eliminate them or to cope better with them.
 
One more step can be added – another preventive one that builds on all the strategies so far. Your client can be introduced to a self care plan. Such a plan ensures that your client has a good diet, gets enough sound sleep, exercises regularly, leads a balanced life, enjoys themselves frequently, avoids negative self talk and is on the path they want to be.
 
There is no guarantee that they won’t slump in exhaustion in the afternoon stressed by the day’s events – but chances are this will be the exception to the rule as they will have strategies to prevent this occurrence and coping skills to help reduce the effects from those unavoidable stressors.
 
Author: Zahava Starak